Is AM radio dead? I've been staying at my Dad's house, recovering from surgery,
and he was the chief engineer of the biggest AM station in St. Louis.
The 50,000 Watt KMOX.
Radio is a hot topic around here, and I wanted him to answer that question since
he and I are planning to go to tour an AM radio tower later this year.
In November, the FCC commissioner defended AM radio.
He said it was the backbone of the Emergency Alert System in the US.
And it keeps millions of farmers in sync with the rest of the world.
He said we need to preserve it.
On the other hand, you have Tesla. None of their cars include an AM radio dial at all.
And Tesla is not alone.
It seems like most of the auto manufacturers are ditching AM
when they build their EVs because their engineers can't be bothered,
because the electric motors create interference with the AM receivers.
And that brings us to today. My dad has the Retio I gave him last year.
This thing is a retro Nixie tube clock and radio, except if you switch it over to the AM dial.
Well, just
listen, [on radio] your kid like, don't get hurt, don't fall down the stairs... Don't, don't hurt.
[Jeff] So back to the question I asked at the beginning of the video.
Is AM radio dead? [Joe] No. But it is suffering.
And it's suffering from everything from LED lighting, TVs that are made.
It's suffering from an abundance of AM signals all over the place.
It's suffering from its audio quality compared to FM and every other service that's come along.
And it's suffering from the revenue loss.
You know, the average AM station probably has less listeners,
except for the big ones like St. Louis KMOX.
You got KDKA and WBZ and all these other states around the country that do very well.
But the loss of revenue of what was has made it hard to maintain.
They're expensive sites to maintain.
[Jeff] FM radio doesn't seem to tend to suffer from those problems,
and obviously Internet radio doesn't.
So what is different with AM radio that makes it so susceptible to that kind of interference?
[Joe] The easiest way is the receiver is looking
at the amplitude all the time. That's how it's being decoded.
What you're hearing is the amplitude changes being decoded by the receiver.
So for you to hear them. Well, lightning is an amplitude change.
All the lightning energy and the frequency
that's being received at the receiver is amplitude change.
On the FM side, it's looking for the frequency to change, and it's using that.
So even though the levels might be changing, it's decoding the frequency changes,
which are different than the amplitude changes that AM has to deal with.
So AM, if I'm near something with an AM radio, that puts out energy,
any kind of energy in that frequency range, which like KMOX 1120 is 1.1 MHz, right?
And I can't tell you how many computing devices liked 1 MHz
for one of their chips inside or whatever.
But any energy like that floating around in the air is decoded as if it were an AM station.
So on the FM side, it would be decoded as nothing except noise, because it would be looking for
intelligence on the frequency changing as opposed to just raw amplitude changes at that frequency.
[Jeff] What you're saying the spark gap was basically like just generating tons
of noise and you could decode that noise by seeing, oh, there's lots of noise.
[Joe] Yeah.
Well, and to tell you more on that, when I went to KMOX,
there were reports of people's toilets playing KMOX and other things,
but the movement that can be caused so an arc causes movements in energy.
And then of course, you've got fields being created with a lot of energy.
Anything that directly tunes in happens to tune in an AM frequency on one of its wavelengths,
or quarter wave, half wave, eighth wave...
When it tunes it in with enough energy,
it will create that little bit of a gap of energy and cause vibrations.
A coil can vibrate and you'll actually hear the station.
It won't be great, but you will hear the station on that coil.
We probably will see that at the station tour.
[Jeff] What are some good reasons to keep AM radio around? Why are
there still stations on it today? Why would someone want to preserve it?
[Joe] Well, the number one, I think, cool factor of AM and there aren't a
whole lot of stations that get to participate in this in a wide way.
It's the carry of the signal at night.
We—for instance, KMOX, St. Louis baseball Cardinal fans...
We had fans in cities, people go to Washington to live as they were,
congressman or something, and they would tune into Cardinal games at night.
People retire to Florida, people moved to Texas and so forth.
And they could, you know, come that 830 time at night,
catch the last end of the Cardinal game on KMOX.
That's the number one thing.
And because of their history, they were built with infrastructure.
A lot of the big ones were built with infrastructure for the emergency system.
They have generators and EMP-proof buildings for spare transmitters and all kinds of things.
So there's quite an investment in that kind of thing in the big AMs.
As far as the smaller AM goes, once they're built, the hassles of maintenance is they're on acres of
land, usually. They have multiple towers that you have to maintain, and that's the real cost.
But a well-built site, they stay with just tweaks and tuning and cleaning
and cutting of grass, trimming of bushes for quite a while.
[Jeff] Getting back to the Retio that I mentioned earlier,
when I gave it to you in the video last year, we turned it on and we
noticed like Bluetooth sounded great, but the radio did not sound quite as good.
It seemed like for FM, it was over modulated, but the AM signal wasn't amazing.
Well, the fact is that it was receiving a lot of the stations, even the AMs,
but the audio quality was not very good at all.
And I think it's the decoding, the way they modulate their audio to get it to the speaker.
And you'd have to refer to the exact he gave us, the type of modulation,
speaker modulation they were doing in the amplifier.
It's not that good.
And I think also there's a place somewhere where it's over driven,
either coming right out of the receive chip.
And that brings you to the point, right, that if the guy is building
this box and it's retro and it's cool and it does great for Bluetooth,
but then they throw the radio in there and it's like and there's a radio.
You know and they have a version of this that comes with the HD chip, and—it's not HD—it
says DAB on the motherboard, so I assume it's a European, or they may have focused on that, too.
But at the bottom of the pile, for many years now,
AM radio has been sitting like, put the radio in, put the chips in.
Oh, yeah, "AM activated."
So AM has been getting narrow-banded for decades, so it won't sound even as good as it could.
Even with HD Radio.
If you're an AM station HD Radio, most people were squeezing down to 5 khz audio bandwidth,
which all of you audio guys know, that's not very much that's not much better than a phone call.
So AM has been hurt by that also that the designers of Radios are not emphasizing it.
And then you've got companies like Tesla, who it's just a hassle to make it AM radio
work in their car because of all the other circuitry they've got.
They probably interfere with it.
I have no confirmation of that, but I know that it was a shock
to see a car come out without an AM radio, whatever that's been.
How long has it been? Ten years?
[Jeff] Ten years. [Joe] Yeah.
[Jeff] Could it be the actual motors that can be interfered? [Joe] Yeah, the electric
motors and the controlling circuits, those kind of things put out hash.
There's a point where there's just hash. The digital circuits alone, every power supply
feeding a digital circuit is sucked down in a digital way, and energy comes off of those.
Unless you completely design filtering that would not allow it...
And I think part of the deal is when you're using that much energy,
I don't know how many kilowatts goes into an accelerated Tesla.
I'm guessing that they don't want to design the radio system to be—it's just not important.
I think AM faces that, too.
How are you going to maintain your importance? And ever since I can remember,
the smartest radio people over my career always said, it's the content, it's the content.
So if you get the content right and it was only on an AM radio.
The people who really want that content are going to
figure out how to get that content on an AM radio.
The way you could distribute audio now is amazingly flexible.
So AM has to compete with that, too.
So it's very receivable. You can get AM radio all over the place.
But like I said, the quality here and the interference there,
there's just all these things that are just, like, just hard.
[Jeff] I notice you have a solar panel behind you here. [Joe] Yeah.
[Jeff] What's this for? Why do you have a solar panel behind your desk?
[Joe] Well, I hide gifts behind there. That's one thing I do.
And I AM, you know, I've got it to do something with, which right now is undefined, but I hope to
use it at a tower site, you know—emergency kit or charging a battery thing or...
[Jeff] So right now, this is basically the world's most expensive present hider.
[Joe] Yes. It's one of the best I've ever had here, too.
[Jeff] And speaking of presents, I do have one present for you for this Christmas.
[Joe] Oh, my goodness.
[Jeff] Go ahead and take the glance at what that is.
[Joe] So this is great.
This is a book you had talked about somewhere in Tweeting or whatever, all that stuff you do.
And I saw it, and I was like,
"I've got to get that book!" Only guess what? I never got that book.
Now I have it. I do recommend I just barely looking at it.
I just recommend this to anyone who has an interest in any kind of hobbyist.
Computer, electronics, AM transmitter repair, anything like that.
This is a great book.
[Jeff] Merry Christmas. Even though this video will most likely come out after
Christmas. Merry Christmas to everybody watching.
[Joe] Yeah. Merry Christmas, everyone.