Trunk Line

“American vs. Canadian Radio” — drawn by bing.com/images/create

A couple of years ago I was asked on Quora, “How do American radio stations compare to Canadian stations?” This was my answer. 

Mostly the differences are regulatory. But some are also geographic. Examples:

1. The Canadian government has a national network, the CBC, much as does the U.K. with the BBC. And, like the BBC, it’s very reputable. Both are “royal” entities, for which there is no U.S. equivalent. (And no, NPR doesn’t qualify, since it’s independent of the federal government and almost entirely—last report, 98+%—paid for by member stations, sponsorships and underwriting.)
2. Programming is more highly regulated, especially around music, in Canada. For example, the Canadian Radio-Televsion and Communmicatons Commission (CRTC) has Canadian content requirements for music on Canadian radio, which requires that commercial, community, campus and native radio stations “must ensure that at least 35% of the Popular Music they broadcast each week is Canadian content.” The percentage for CBC stations is 50%.
3. The CRTC is committed to sunsetting AM broadcasting, while the FCC is not. While there are still some CBC stations still on the AM band, many signals have either gone dark or have been sold off. Here is a list of the remaining CBC AM signals.

Despite Canada’s slow rollback of AM broadcasting, its prairie features an AM station with the largest daytime* coverage in the world: CBK/540 in Watrous, Saskatchewan. While there are lots of 50,000-watt stations in the world (and that’s the max allowed in the U.S. and Canada)—and a handful cranking out up to two million watts—CBK’s 50,000-watt transmitter sits on some of the most conductive dirt in the world, giving the station coverage that reaches from the Rockies in Alberta to the west, the shores of Hudson Bay to the east; and north across the borders of the Northwest Territories and Nunavut, and well into Montana, North Dakota, and Minnesota to the south:

One of those two million-watt giants is Transmitter Solt, for Kossuth Rádió, Hungary’s national radio station. While its signal is immense electronically, its daytime* coverage, while very large, is limited by relatively nonconductive ground. Still, in a way, Transmitter Solt is also Canadian, since the transmitter itself is made by Nautel, of Nova Scotia, which in recent years has become what some regard as the preeminent maker of broadcast transmitters.

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*Note that coverage by day and night is vastly different for AM (aka MW) radio. That’s because in daytime the lowest (D) layer of the ionosphere absorbs signals in that band, and at night the same signals bounce off the next layer up (E) for distances typically of several hundred miles. Or, in cases like Transmitter Solt, thousands of miles. As a somewhat separate matter, shortwave signals bounce off the higher F1 and F2 layers. Check that last link for particulars.

When I moved to Palo Alto from North Carolina in 1985, the preëminent rock station for the Bay Area was KFOG, on 104.5 FM. The morning jock was M. Dung (the on-air handle of Michael Slavko), who did more than anyone else to make me feel comfortable and welcome in a completely new environment. Like the rest of the station, M (what he usually called himself) was “always on, but a little off.”

My fave rock station in North Carolina had been WRDU/106.1, to which many friends who had worked at WQDR/94.7 had just migrated after that much-loved station flipped to country music. (A genre I also like, but we’re talking about friends here.)

From  1982 to 2017, KFOG was a great friend to fans of rock and related genres. You can see how much it was loved just by searching for it. The top results are tribute sites KFOG.com and KFOGisForever. Below those are a list of heartfelt lamentations.

I’ll carry this forward with my answer to a Quora question: Will 104.5 FM in San Francisco ever flip back to any music format?

In American radio, very few station formats are permanent. Two of the most durable are all-news and all-sports. For decades, the biggest all-news and all-sports stations in major markets were only on AM signals. Nearly all of those stations in recent years have added FM signals, displacing whatever was on the FM channel they moved to. All-news WINS/1010 in New York, WBBM/780 in Chicago, and KNX/1070 in Los Angeles moved to 92.3, 105.9, and 97.1 respectively, replacing the music stations on those channels. All-sports WEEI/850 in Boston and WFAN/660 in New York did the same when they moved to 93.7 and 101.9 in those cities. And KNBR/680 did the same in San Francisco when it added the signal at 104.5, long the home of KFOG.

Never mind that KNBR’s day signal covers a third of California and its night signal covers the whole Western U.S., while KFOG’s old signal barely covers the Bay Area. AM is a dead band walking. FM is where the listening is, and the signal at 104.5 is at least competitive. By now there are very few incumbent ratings leaders on AM that have not added an FM signal. KFI/640 in Los Angeles, WLW/700 in Cincinnati, KOA/850 in Denver, and WSCR/670 in Chicago are four that come to mind. There are a handful of others. Even with those, I’m sure it’s a matter of time before their owners find an FM signal to add.

In the longer term, FM is doomed as well. The Internet is slowly eating away at every incumbent communications medium: print, radio, TV, all of it. Your best radio is now the phone in your pocket or purse. All stations of any importance are there as well as on old-fashioned broadcast bands. If you want to hear KFOG again, there are a number of websites streaming the old programs. Nearly every piece of recorded music ever played on KFOG is also on music services from Apple, Amazon, Spotify, and other sources.

Here is another reason why KFOG is unlikely to return to the airwaves: rock music is still with us, but its era is over. We could argue that, but look up Rock Era and see what comes up. KFOG played a lot of genres other than pure rock (one of the things that made the station distinctive), but it was still a rock station.

Music genres today are largely created and maintained online, rather than on the air.

But hey, maybe the old KFOG will return someday.

But, if it does, it will need to pry the callsign from its current holder: KFOG/1250 in Little Rock, Arkansas. Might be a long shot, but money talks. If there is an economic case, it’s one worth making. And, for what it’s worth, the station mostly identifies as “Power 92” (named for its FM signal), and I read in June that the AM side was off the air.

In respect to infrastructure (the theme of this blog), my point is this: As we move into the Digital Age, the Internet and digital tech will finish absorbing and obsolescing every old analog communication system.

Radio’s age lasted roughly from the early twenties of the twentieth century to the early twenties of the twenty-first. Some of what it was will live on through streams and podcasts online. But it’s a matter of time before radios will only play hiss.

A few months ago, here in Bloomington, Indiana, everyone’s cell phone blasted an emergency warning sound, along with the alert above: a tornado waring. At the same time, civil emergency sirens wailed all over town.

A TORNADO WARNING means a tornado has been spotted or close enough. (A WATCH means there is a risk of a tornado.) Note the last two words: Check media.

That we did, here in the basement where I’m sitting right now. (It’s my office.) First I went to our only local AM station, WGCL/1370 (also 89.7 on FM). On the air was an interview with a guy talking about his tattoos. Then I checked all the local and regional radio stations listed here (on the LocalWiki where I dutifully put them):

• WBWB (B97)
• WCLS/97.7
• WFHB/91.3 (also 98.1 in Bloomington and 106.3 in Ellettsville)
• WFIU/103.7 (also WIFU2 on 101.9)
• WGCL/1370 and 98.7
• WHCC/105.5
• WIUX/99.1
• WTTS/92.3 (also Rock96 The Quarry on 96.1 and WTTS-HD2)

Nothing. On any of them. Not even on WFIU, which is the substantial public station at Indiana University.

While I fiddled around with a portable radio, my wife wisely asked, “Have you checked Twitter?” I hadn’t, so I opened a browser on my computer, searched for #Bloomington and #Tornado, and got all the information we needed: everyone was hunkering down, and nobody had seen a tornado. So, we all lucked out.

But the experience was relevant to the regulatory alarms that were being raised, about car makers’ plans to drop AM radio from their cars’ dashboard infotainment systems. For example, Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey’s bill S. 1669: AM Radio for Every Vehicle Act of 2023  seeks required inclusion of AM radios in cars, so IPAWS, the Integrated Public Alert And Warning System “described in section 526 of the Homeland Security Act of 2002 (6 U.S.C. 321o)” (says the bill) would blast through AM radios, and hopefully save some listeners’ asses.

In a press release, the good Senator said this: “Unlike FM radio, AM radio operates at lower frequencies and longer wavelengths, enabling it to pass through solid objects and travel further than other radio waves.”

Not exactly. AM and FM work differently, but both have limited range, and every station has its own coverage pattern. And none of those equal cellular Internet and satellite radio in overall coverage, though both of those have limitations as well.

[As an aside, not long after I wrote this post, I visited two stations in one studio in Palm Springs, California, and published a photo album of the visit here. Best I can tell, both stations live off rent to cell companies for the tower behind their studios. And they don’t even own the tower anymore. A company that specializes in cell towers and rental owns it, and pays the station owner for the right to occupy the land. From what I saw, neither station was ready to deal with an emergency. Sure, maybe somebody could be called in, but on-site staffing was the exception, not the rule. Oh, and there was a third station once transmitting from the site, but that one was kindly donated to a local college whose staff and students weren’t interested in it, and turned in the license.]

If we were to zero-base radio today, we probably wouldn’t have stations at all. We’d have streams and podcasts, over the Internet, coming from anybody who wants to put out whatever they please. It would all be delivered by fiber, copper wiring, and cellular wireless, perhaps with satellite broadcasting thrown in.

Of course, we have that already.

By the way, Markey’s ploy worked, to some degree. For example, Ford reversed its plans to drop AM radio from its new cars. But AM towers everywhere are being logged off land sold to make room for housing developments and shipping centers. Examples: WMAL in Washington, WFNI in Indianapolis, and WFME in New York—to name a few among many.

Almost all the rest persist on shoestring budgets. You hear programming (now re-dubbed “content”) on their airwaves, but in most stations you will find no human beings sitting in a studio and working a control board with a microphone in their face. Those people got laid off long ago. Nearly all content is piped in from elsewhere. Voices included.

AM also sounds like shit. It doesn’t have to, but it does. For that problem you can mostly blame the radio makers, especially for cars. Switch from FM to AM, and it sounds like somebody just put a pillow over the speakers.

The simple fact is that AM radio is moving toward obsolescence while its popularity drops toward zero. (Ratings on the whole are bad and getting worse.)

Of course, emergency notifications are important. The question of how best to blast out those notifications and then get good news coverage during and after an emergency can be answered in lots of ways. But keeping AM stations running may not be the best of those options.