DC Infowarrior
August 30, 2025

AM radio was once the heartbeat of American broadcasting. Families gathered around it during the Depression, war news poured through it in the 1940s, and it carried baseball games, Top 40, and talk radio for decades after. But in the 2020s, its decline feels irreversible. Audiences are shrinking, younger listeners barely know it exists, and carmakers are even dropping AM from dashboards.

So if AM’s commercial role fades away, what becomes of the spectrum?

Where Things Stand Now

• Declining audience: Most listeners are on FM, streaming, or podcasts.
• Interference: Lightning, electronics, and power lines make AM noisy and hard to hear.
• Cost: Running a 50,000-watt transmitter is expensive, and the return on investment keeps falling.
• Survival strategy: Most AM stations cling to life by feeding their brands onto FM translators.

It isn’t hard to imagine the FCC eventually allowing AMs to shut down altogether and operate only on FM. If that happens, large chunks of the AM band could fall silent.

My Speculative Idea

Instead of letting AM go dark or auctioning it for obscure data services, I picture something more ambitious: repurposing the entire AM band as a national emergency system.

Think of it as NOAA Weather Radio merged with a modernized CONELRAD.

How It Could Work

• Everyday use:
  • All AM transmitters would become high-powered NOAA Weather Radio outlets.
  • Instead of VHF signals that only travel ~40 miles, AM groundwave could cover entire states or multi-county regions.
  • People wouldn’t need a special VHF-only weather radio; any AM-capable receiver could tune in.
• Crisis use:
  • In a national emergency — natural disaster, terrorist attack, invasion, even nuclear war — those same AM transmitters would switch to the Emergency Radio Network.
  • All stations would synchronize on designated frequencies and carry official instructions from FEMA and state authorities.
  • Key transmitters could be hardened against EMPs, ensuring that even in worst-case scenarios, some part of the network stays on the air.

Why AM Fits the Job

• Range: Medium-frequency signals cover wide areas, especially at night.
• Penetration: AM waves get into valleys, buildings, and forests better than VHF line-of-sight.
• Infrastructure: Hundreds of AM towers already exist — many could be repurposed instead of scrapped.
• Resilience: AM is one-to-many broadcasting. Unlike cell or internet systems, it doesn’t collapse when millions of people tune in at once.

The Challenges

Of course, this is pure speculation on my part, and I know the hurdles:

• Converting the existing NOAA system from VHF to AM would require new planning and equipment.
• Broadcasters would lose commercial spectrum unless compensated.
• The FCC and Congress would have to reclassify AM as a public-safety service rather than a commercial one.

Why It’s Worth Thinking About

Maybe none of this will happen. Maybe AM just dies out and the spectrum gets sliced up for niche digital services. But personally, I think it would be poetic if AM got a second life — not as a struggling commercial band, but as a national lifeline.

A system where the old AM dial becomes both a daily weather information service and a resilient crisis network would give the United States something it sorely lacks: a communications backbone that works when everything else fails.

It would be, in effect, the return of CONELRAD — but on a much larger, more powerful scale.