For those who have been waiting with baited breath since 2013 to find out how the FCC plans to revitalize the FM dial: your wait is over. The Commission released its First Report and Order on Revitalization of the AM Radio Service late on Friday after its October open meeting. The order covers a few […]
When Art Bell announced his return to daily broadcasting last spring the plan was to be internet-only, with just one shortwave station picking up the online feed. By the time his new show, “Midnight in the Desert,” launched in July he’d signed up about 23 terrestrial broadcast stations, indicating some definite pent-up demand. This week […]
Recently a reporter asked me how common independently-owned commercial radio stations were. I told him that they were a dying breed and another example of this disappearing category is talk radio station WYBG-AM in Massena, New York. After 57 years on the air, the station shut down on June 30. Its owners still hold out […]
Last last year I received an email inviting me to visit high school radio station KBCP (aka “the Bell”) at Bellarmine College Preparatory School in San Jose, California. I’m always excited to see stations and it’s rare that I get to visit high school radio stations. After exchanging a few emails, I arranged to visit […]
Talk radio veteran Darryl Parks is a harsh critic of how the format continues to lose touch with most of the radio audience who aren’t white male baby boomers. In a new post this week he takes aim at Rush Limbaugh, describing the leading conservative talk host’s “fall into oblivion.” Parks notes that Limbaugh’s program […]
Today REC Networks announced that it has begun work on the REC Radio History Project. It has started to mine the FCC database for historic AM station information and will be adding that material to the REC Broadcast Query tool. So far, it’s added information related to Los Angeles stations KFI and KHJ. According to […]
This week my dad and I made a second attempt at building a crystal radio using one of the kits that I got for Christmas. Readers might recall that back in December we made a radio using the Elenco Crystal Radio Kit. This time around we tried out the Slinky Experiment #151 Crystal Radio Kit. […]
I’ve always wanted to build a radio and luckily Santa brought me three radio kits last month. So, the day after Christmas, I enlisted my dad and my daughter to help make a few. For my first project, my dad and I constructed a crystal radio using a kit made by Go Lab/Tree of Knowledge […]
I am continuing to follow the Federal Communications Commission’s proceeding on saving AM radio. A recent comment submission comes from iHeartCommunications (formerly Clear Channel) Executive Vice President Jeff Littlejohn. Among his observations at an ex parte meeting with the FCC: Mr. Littlejohn noted that many commenters in the AM Revitalization proceeding have called for increased […]
The FCC released its quarterly list of the total number of licensed broadcast stations this week and once again the number of radio stations has increased since last quarter. As of September 30, there were 15,433 licensed full power radio stations in the United States. The only category that decreased was the number of AM […]
