Lucky to put up so many antennas in your neighborhood. Some associations won't let us park our car in the drive-gotta be in the garage. AM Stereo, like HD Radio ,never caught on here. Heard AMS only once in Dayton,OH backin the 90s.
Well I have a 10 foot satellite dish on the house as well. No HOA around here. No Strata, free hold land, and we can put up wherever we want in this community. This has all been up since 93, so anything they try to ram through I would be grandfathered anyway. AM stereo used te be common here, every station was stereo back in the day. The reason that AM stereo was such a disaster though was because your very own FCC didn't do what they were required to do. With FM, and Color TV there was a standard set that every broadcaster and receiver manufacture adhered to. Not so with AM stereo. They approved no fewer than 5 different systems. Magnavox, Harris, Motorola, Kahn and Hazeltine. The Khan and Hazeltine systems were very similar, and worked off ISB or independent side band with the upper transmitting the right channel and the lower the left channel. The other 3 worked on a L+R mono AM modulated signal, and a L-R signal that was phase modulated onto the carrier, but the way it was phase modulated varied in the 3 systems. This created confusion, and hesitation by many broadcasters to go stereo in the USA because they didn't want to pick a loosing format. By 1993 the FCC finially grew a pair and picked the Motorola system. Any station that had one of the other systems installed needed to convert, and the majority of them did. Back to Mono! Here were I am, all the music stations on AM have gone to the talk format and sports radio, so they all turned off their stereo signal. This is too bad, because talk radio sounded simply amazing in AM stereo. Now it is a hobby, to see what stations I can pick up when the skip is rolling in stereo. There are many AM enthusiasts that would love to see a resurgence in AM stereo. It is a unique experience, and the sound is really nice and warm on a proper AM stereo radio with wide band IF strip.
1340 WEKY here in Richmond, Kentucky used to be AM Stereo. When I worked for the station from 93-97, I think they had stopped broadcasting in stereo. 840 WHAS in Louisville was broadcasting in stereo back in the late 80's-early 90's. I used to have a shirt that said 840 stereo on it. WSM out of Nashville used to be AM STEREO as well.
The ID said 98.9 FM and 930 AM... so that could be KBAI ("K-Bay") in Bellingham, Washington, which has a Classic Hits music format and broadcasts on those frequencies.
99.1FM CKIX and 930AM CJYQ in St. John’s, Newfoundland were set up so that back in the days of analogue, you could just hit the band select and not have to tune or do very little to get the sister station. I wonder if the owners in this case were thinking the same thing. Also, in Saint John, New Brunswick, 930AM CFBC and 98.9FM CJYC also had the same arrangement on the go. I should also say that these 2 sets of stations were not simulcasting. .
Back in the mid 2000s I used to listen to WJR in Detroit whenever I was traveling within range, and my 1999 Ford Expedition came with an AM stereo radio. I was amazed how good that station sounded! But it was a talk radio station, so there wasn’t much stereo content. I wondered why the AM music stations didn’t broadcast stereo. A few years ago I talked with a radio station engineer who had removed the stereo equipment from a local AM station, and asked him why. He said it was because they were going to be changing over to digital soon and then they would all be stereo. Well we know how well that has gone! Meanwhile a useful thing has been lost.
I can't imagine AM Stereo lasting much longer. Not enough receivers to justify the expense. The only reason it may be there now is just to keep the engineer happy.
You're over on the coast of BC right? At nights if you try 800am, once in a while you can pull in CHAB broadcasting out of Moose Jaw, SK. I think they're still broadcasting in stereo. You have to post your reception logs. I'm curious to see what you find.
Last I knew i think it's WLS Chicago 890 is in stereo and one out of Kansas city is also in stereo. I have a Chrysler and Cadillac radio they both have am stereo.
I think that AM, stereo or not, will out live FM broadcasts. It's just such a fundamentally straightforward way of sending signals, and if society does collapse AM will be the defacto standard again.
AM radio's days are numbered, unfortunately. Just as shortwave broadcasting has dwindled to only a few religious and propaganda stations in recent years. The trouble with AM is the operating costs vs the advertising revenue stream. Here where I am, AM is used only for news and sports stations. All the music stations have gone. Some sold to specialty channels like Chinese or Punjabi programming, and the rest just went off the air. AM broadcasting takes a ton of power. An average station is pumping out 10-50KW during the day. By contrast most FM stations are in the 5KW or less power up the mast. With FM they can get allot of gain out of the antenna whereas AM, they are typically working off a 1/4 wave antenna, so it is not that efficient, and therefore lots of power is needed. Then there is the real estate that the antenna needs for an AM station. Nope AM stations are going the way of the dinosaurs, extinct.
Well, one thing. The days of music on AM radio ARE as extinct as the dinosaurs. AM radio nowadays is good for just three things: news, sports and talk shows. If AM stereo existed about 45 years ago, there may well have still been music on AM radio. WSM (650 in Nashville) still plays music, but most of the VERY few AMs that have music, you can bet they simulcast an FM somewhere or other.
You can! AM Stereo is still being broadcast in the USA. Here is a link to one of the few live stations still on the air. The streaming is from an AM Max receiver off air. i1430.com/ It was fantastic sounding. I loved AM stereo when it was common.
So you hooked up the car stereo without installing by powering it with the cigarette lighter and connecting the speaker wires to the aux input by using a severed RCA cable and an adapter for RCA to 3.5mm for the input. And how did you connect the car's antenna cable to the stereo?
I would imagine that the uk 88-108 mhz fm stereo band will slowly lose stations too, but thats more because of crap digital radio, i like analog radio, im a stick in the mud lol.
It would be nice if they still used it here but they all turned off the stereo encoder and put their stereo feed as an HD2 hd3 multi cast with their sister station FM MUX
It appears, from the comments, that there still are a few stations that broadcast in AM stereo. I only ever remember one station in Calgary that broadcast AM stereo in the early 1980s.
@@12voltvids I don't recall seeing many AM radios with stereo capability in car radios or boombox stereos. Without receivers, there would be no point in broadcasting in AM stereo.
@@Abitibidoug there used to be. And stereo was included in a lot of factory car radios back in the 80s. I used to have a 86 Toyota Cressida 8:00 a.m. stereo with a wideband button so it sounded really good. Aftermarket companies made them too Phillips had an AM stereo FM stereo cassette deck. I had a Sony in my car that would receive all four systems. The thing that really hurt AM stereo in the early days was the FCC. They decided to let the market choose which format would be used to broadcast. That was an absolute disaster. Radio stations were generally bound to use the system that they're transmitter builder was offering. If you had a Harris transmitter you were stuck on the Harris system if you had a Motorola transmitter Motorola. All five systems initially required specific radios. There were two main transmission systems that were employed when was the Khan / hazeldine system that used independent side bands. Then there was the other threw systems Motorola Harris and Magnavox which used a combination of amplitude and phase modulation. Even though they work ed on the same principle they did it differently each having side advantages over the others. One had the best sound quality but resulted in slight distortion on mono radios another had the best separation but with subject to interference from sky waves and the third offered a slight compromise on range and fidelity but offered the best compatibility with mono radios. The independent side band was it interesting system because you could use two mono radios tune one slightly higher and one slightly lower and the basic detector would favor either the upper or the lower side band so you could get the stereo effect which is using two radios but no improvement and Fidelity doing that because I regular radio was not really a high fidelity device but with a proper stereo receiver with wide band it actually sounded pretty good. Unfortunately with four incompatible systems that really hurt the roll out because if the station you wanted to listen to was using a system different than the radio that you owned you could only receive that station and model. In my location there were stations broadcasting and Motorola, Harris and Khan. Of course Canada followed the Americans on this and allowed all the systems. Canada however did make the decision earlier than the Americans to adopt one system and all the stations had to switch to Motorola or cease broadcasting the stereo. Most of them were using Motorola but one that was not switched off their stereo. Finally the FCC made the decision to go with one system but that was like closing the Barn door after all the horses have escaped. when stations that had already heavily invested in one of the formats found that the equipment they were using was no longer legal to use and they either had to invest in more money or switch it off guess what they did. I think I am stereo would have been a great success had back in the early 80s when they rolled it out they had gone with one format regardless of which broadcast format they went with and they pick one format it would have been a success. Think of the mess that would have happened with television if during the transition from black and white to color they allowed the different proposed systems of the day to go on the air. There was more than one system there was the CBS system which used a spinning color wheel spun in front of your picture tube to display red green and blue sequentially. That was one of the original systems proposed in fact that's what they used in the first color broadcast from the Moon if you remember watching the astronauts bouncing around on the moon with their space suits strobing different colors in the reflection from the sun. Could you imagine having a big box sitting in your living room about three times the size of the screen to house this big spinning glass wheel of color pains to display the red green and blue frames as they were being broadcast? they formed the ntsc or the national television systems committee to come up with a compatible system that every broadcaster would have to adhere to. Have they done something similar when AM stereo was first being deployed it would probably be a lot more stations that were still broadcasting in AM stereo today and it'd be a lot more radios available. What's the Motorola system was declared the only system to use Motorola was making am decoder chips that were only pennies and any manufacturer could use them but it was a little bit late at that point that decision needed to have been made before the first equipment was installed. now broadcasters can still broadcast today on stereo there's nothing stopping them from it and there's a station in the states that broadcast music I forget their call signs off hand but their AM stereo stream is available online to listen to. And by a.m. stereo stream I mean they have an AM receiver sitting in their studio receiving the signal off air and putting that on the internet so you can actually listen to the quality of an AM station and it sounds great. I just tripped across their video last week on RUclips and watch their studio tour and their transmitter tour and then went to their website to listen to what was on air
@@12voltvids Wow, myself and other viewers here thank you for the thorough explanation. That's more than I could find anywhere else. As you say, there should have been one standard format, like there was for CDs in 1983.
AM stereo hit Canada in about 1982 or 3. All the music stations were broadcasting in stereo. I have severall air check tapes and a sticker from 1040Kicks CKKS. That sticker is stuck to an old microwave oven (still works too) that I am hanging onto just for the sticker. The first time I ever won anything from a radio station was 1040 back in I think 86 or so when they signed on with their new rock format. When the station first went on air they were MOR or middle of the road type music and they were the first AM stereo station in the Vancouver market (because they were brand new). When they changed formats they had a contest where they would just phone somone random landline that was listed in the phone book. (cell phones back in 86 were brand new, and only realtors, lawyers, doctors ect could afford them) They would say on the air, that they were going to make a random call sometime and if you answered with "The phrase that pays" which was "1040 Kicks" they gave away 1040.00! I was working for the TV shop and had just gone home for lunch. I was in an apartment at the time and as I was unlocking my door the phone started ringing. Nobody would normally be calling me during the week at that time so I answered 1040 kicks and all hell broke loose on the other end. I won the 1040.00 prize. They recorded the call, as music was still playing on the radio. This is how they made it difficult to win, because they had already made the call when t hey would announce that they were going to make the call. They played it back a few minutes later, and I had to arrange to get the cash picked up at the studio, because my boss wouldn't give me time off to go pick it up in person. So my girlfriend took my ID and claimed my prize. Back in those days that was about 3 months rent, so that was a lot of money. I listened to that station every day until they changed formats. Now they are a 24/7 sports station. Still a 50,000 watt flame thrower, but not in stereo anymore. Too bad because sports sounds great in stereo. They were broadcasting in stereo (sports) until about 5 years ago when the property that the transmitter was on was sold, and they had to relocate the antenna and transmitter building to the other side of t he highway. When they rebuilt they co-loacted 2 50KW Am transmitters, 1040 and 1410 another sports station in the same building sharing the 7 new towers. Sports sounded great in stereo as even though the announcers were in mono, they had the crowd atmosphere sound in full stereo, and it really added to the realism of the game. I miss those days. Anyway AM stereo used to be on all the stations here, now none of the locals have the AM exciter running anymore. All the music stations are on FM. They all sound the same. Either playing modern crap, or rehashing the same 100 classic rock tracks over and over. Puts me off listening to the radio, so I spend my days listening to news sports and talk.... On AM radio. Sure would sound nice in stereo. The country station isn't bad for a change, but if I want real music, then I have the CBC in the evening when they play Jazz and Blues, or listen to NPR out of the states through all the static.
Yep. And had AM stereo been around in the mid-to-late '70s, wonder if WABC and WLS, to name just two, would've still been playing music. Terrible loss, that.
Dave - Here is a list of AM stations that broadcast AM Stereo, not sure how current it is (not my site, just an internet find): meduci.com/stations.html ~Jack, VEG
Cool. It was a great format. Sounds so much better than the siriusly bad SXM crap that they actually expect us to pay for. (No I don't BTW. It cam in my new car and once the trial was done they were done)
@@paulnadratowski3942 To each his own. I have 23,000+ tracks on the SD card in the car, and get commercial free music on my cable package so I don't hear commercials. I listen to news and talk radio so I find out what is going on. XM here in Canada works out to 21.00 a month after the 14.5% royalty tax and government taxes on top. I get a nice cable package for that. In my old car I got sucked into a 500 lifetime package. The radio died after 3 years and they refused to transfer the "lifetime" package over because it was the lifetime of the radio. Now had I totaled the car or if it had been stolen they would have transferred it but because it was a radio failure after warranty they said too bad so sad. When I switched to XM just an error code came up with instructions to call XM. The rep said it was a module failure and I would have to buy another one. When I mentioned I had a lifetime sub I was informed they no longer offer that package and it could not be reactivated even though he is looking at the screen that showed I had paid for a lifetime service. Explained it was the lifetime of the radio and the radio has failed. So I said f&-+ em. Got the new car and over the 3 months of free service I bet I didn't listen to more than about 10 hours. Same songs in same rotation terrible sound. I just leave my memory card playing and I never know what is going to come up next but it is all good.
12voltvids cool. My new VW has a space for a sim card. I am too damn lazy to use it. Lol. To each his own. I use AM and FM for local stuff... but music... SiriusXM.
I wonder if some of the same AM stations that used to broadcast AM Stereo are now broadcasting in HiDef (HD Radio). We have a handful of AM station in Seattle area using digital HD.
Too bad that AM Steteo didn't succeed. This was the fault of the FCC not picking a standard. The same thing happened with VHS vs Beta, and Bluray vs HD-DVD. The FCC blew it then, and they did it again with Serius and XM. With the later, Seruis and XM both used different satellites, and different technology, and you were basically locked into one or the other depending on what radio your car maker was going to make a factory option. With satellite radio, the 2 companies merged, and now share common programming, but their operating expenses are much higher because they have to maintain 2 incompatible signals for the 2 types of radios that are in use. With AM stereo they had 4 different incompatible systems. Only Sony made a custom chip that could handle all 4 systems. Had the FCC had balls, they would have picked one of the 4 proposed systems, stations would put in that encoder, all the radios would be compatible, and we would probably have plenty of AM stereo stations today rather than the odd one that comes in when the skip is rolling. My solution to AM stereo as far as testing my radios goes was to build myself an AM stsreo low power transmitter. Works great for testing all old AM radios I repair.
@@brentfisher902 You know why it hums? It doesn't know the words. Power lines and DSL phone lines cause much noise on the hf bands. Plasma TVs too. Still lots of those noise generators still in use.
I never understand the purpose of AM stereo. Always thought it was a waste of time b/c AM in my city back in the 80's when AM stereo became available were talk, sports & oldies. No need for stereo for that stuff.
Back in the 80's where I live we had 3 rock and roll AM stations, LG73, 1040 Kicks, and CFUN 1410. They were top 40 and hits stations. The FM rock stations were hard rock, and classic rock. Those stations are still on the air now. 2 of them are sports and one is a traffic station. There was also an oldies station (they just went sports to become the 3rd full time sports radio station) a news talk, and a news station. They were all in stereo, and the sound even for talk was better because they were using stereo microphones in the studio. I rather liked AM stereo when it was on, because the sound was warmer than the harsh FM sound, and it didn't picket fence like the FM channels do. When listening in the car the compression they used made the music sound superior to FM. Everyone I know that heard it agreed that it did sound better. Even at home, it just had a warmer less harsh sound. Like a vinyl record into a vacuum tube amp.
In the 1980s, believe it or not, some AM stations with spoken word formats did flip to stereo. KYW 1060 in Philadelphia had an all news format, and they played this cool teletype sound effect behind the newscaster. In retrospect, the whole thing sounds like a gimmick. Some years later, I heard that a motivation for broadcasting AM stereo on stations like KYW was so that the commercials would stand out.
Central Ohio Dipper Oldies from the 60s were recorded in stereo. Am stereo was not just 2 channels it was wide IF bandwidth to push the frequency response up to 15KHZ which gave am a fertility on par with FM. Not every radio manufacture put in wideband IF but most did. The FCC dropped the ball by allowing 4 incomparable formats. Had they decided on a single format from day 1 we would probably be listening to every station in stereo to this day.
klafong1 It was about the improving the sound quality to try and save am from fm competition. It should have worked but tye 4 incomparable formats killed it. By the time the FCC got off their ass and selected Motorola standard and then ordered all the stations that used one of the other 3 to switch most stations said FU FCC and went back to mono. With the roll out of digital radio many stations have started placing the digital carrier onto the am carrier as a phase shift key encoded carrier. So no more analog stereo for most stations.
Actually am stereo sounded great. Very much like FM but no pocket fencing. Better than serius xm. A good radio had a wide band if. Amax was even better up to 19khz frequency response.
HitNation Radio What? Absolute Radio, BBC Radio 5, BBC Radio 4, BBC Radio Wales, BBC Radio Scotland, BBC Radio Ulster, Lyca Radio and there are even more small stations. Most of them can be received at nighttime where I live in Western Germany.
Lucky to put up so many antennas in your neighborhood. Some associations won't let us park our car in the drive-gotta be in the garage. AM Stereo, like HD Radio ,never caught on here. Heard AMS only once in Dayton,OH backin the 90s.
Well I have a 10 foot satellite dish on the house as well.
No HOA around here. No Strata, free hold land, and we can put up wherever we want in this community. This has all been up since 93, so anything they try to ram through I would be grandfathered anyway.
AM stereo used te be common here, every station was stereo back in the day.
The reason that AM stereo was such a disaster though was because your very own FCC didn't do what they were required to do.
With FM, and Color TV there was a standard set that every broadcaster and receiver manufacture adhered to. Not so with AM stereo. They approved no fewer than 5 different systems. Magnavox, Harris, Motorola, Kahn and Hazeltine. The Khan and Hazeltine systems were very similar, and worked off ISB or independent side band with the upper transmitting the right channel and the lower the left channel. The other 3 worked on a L+R mono AM modulated signal, and a L-R signal that was phase modulated onto the carrier, but the way it was phase modulated varied in the 3 systems. This created confusion, and hesitation by many broadcasters to go stereo in the USA because they didn't want to pick a loosing format. By 1993 the FCC finially grew a pair and picked the Motorola system. Any station that had one of the other systems installed needed to convert, and the majority of them did. Back to Mono!
Here were I am, all the music stations on AM have gone to the talk format and sports radio, so they all turned off their stereo signal. This is too bad, because talk radio sounded simply amazing in AM stereo.
Now it is a hobby, to see what stations I can pick up when the skip is rolling in stereo.
There are many AM enthusiasts that would love to see a resurgence in AM stereo. It is a unique experience, and the sound is really nice and warm on a proper AM stereo radio with wide band IF strip.
Agreed about HOAs. My mom's place in Florida requires a license to have potted plants.
1340 WEKY here in Richmond, Kentucky used to be AM Stereo. When I worked for the station from 93-97, I think they had stopped broadcasting in stereo. 840 WHAS in Louisville was broadcasting in stereo back in the late 80's-early 90's. I used to have a shirt that said 840 stereo on it. WSM out of Nashville used to be AM STEREO as well.
The ID said 98.9 FM and 930 AM... so that could be KBAI ("K-Bay") in Bellingham, Washington, which has a Classic Hits music format and broadcasts on those frequencies.
98.9 is Seattle.
99.1FM CKIX and 930AM CJYQ in St. John’s, Newfoundland were set up so that back in the days of analogue, you could just hit the band select and not have to tune or do very little to get the sister station. I wonder if the owners in this case were thinking the same thing. Also, in Saint John, New Brunswick, 930AM CFBC and 98.9FM CJYC also had the same arrangement on the go. I should also say that these 2 sets of stations were not simulcasting. .
Back in the mid 2000s I used to listen to WJR in Detroit whenever I was traveling within range, and my 1999 Ford Expedition came with an AM stereo radio. I was amazed how good that station sounded! But it was a talk radio station, so there wasn’t much stereo content. I wondered why the AM music stations didn’t broadcast stereo. A few years ago I talked with a radio station engineer who had removed the stereo equipment from a local AM station, and asked him why. He said it was because they were going to be changing over to digital soon and then they would all be stereo. Well we know how well that has gone! Meanwhile a useful thing has been lost.
I agree. well at least wy5h the cqam low power transmitter I built I can still experience the sound retransmitting a local FM station.
I can't imagine AM Stereo lasting much longer. Not enough receivers to justify the expense. The only reason it may be there now is just to keep the engineer happy.
www.amstereo.org/radios.htm
AM stereo radios are still available believe it or not!
Believe it or not, most modern HD radios can decode AM stereo as well.
Yes but where do you get these HD radios. I have never seen them for sale.
My Ford Fiesta car radio can decode AM-Stereo signals.
740 WDGY dropped HD in favor of C-QUAM within the past year, and 540 WXYG has been on the air for less than a decade broadcasting in C-QUAM.
You're over on the coast of BC right? At nights if you try 800am, once in a while you can pull in CHAB broadcasting out of Moose Jaw, SK. I think they're still broadcasting in stereo. You have to post your reception logs. I'm curious to see what you find.
I’ve never owned an AM stereo receiver. There’s one station within range that apparently still uses it.
Last I knew i think it's WLS Chicago 890 is in stereo and one out of Kansas city is also in stereo. I have a Chrysler and Cadillac radio they both have am stereo.
I think that AM, stereo or not, will out live FM broadcasts. It's just such a fundamentally straightforward way of sending signals, and if society does collapse AM will be the defacto standard again.
AM radio's days are numbered, unfortunately. Just as shortwave broadcasting has dwindled to only a few religious and propaganda stations in recent years.
The trouble with AM is the operating costs vs the advertising revenue stream.
Here where I am, AM is used only for news and sports stations. All the music stations have gone. Some sold to specialty channels like Chinese or Punjabi programming, and the rest just went off the air. AM broadcasting takes a ton of power. An average station is pumping out 10-50KW during the day. By contrast most FM stations are in the 5KW or less power up the mast. With FM they can get allot of gain out of the antenna whereas AM, they are typically working off a 1/4 wave antenna, so it is not that efficient, and therefore lots of power is needed. Then there is the real estate that the antenna needs for an AM station.
Nope AM stations are going the way of the dinosaurs, extinct.
Well, one thing. The days of music on AM radio ARE as extinct as the dinosaurs. AM radio nowadays is good for just three things: news, sports and talk shows. If AM stereo existed about 45 years ago, there may well have still been music on AM radio. WSM (650 in Nashville) still plays music, but most of the VERY few AMs that have music, you can bet they simulcast an FM somewhere or other.
I would LOVE to hear what AM stereo sounds like. Here in the UK they never had it. Only stereo on FM
You can! AM Stereo is still being broadcast in the USA. Here is a link to one of the few live stations still on the air. The streaming is from an AM Max receiver off air.
i1430.com/
It was fantastic sounding. I loved AM stereo when it was common.
@@12voltvids WION i1430 in Ionia MI is the only radio station I listen to now...The quality of their AM stream is oustanding! I'm also in the UK
@@GarrardAT6 yes it sounds great. Back in the day they all sounded this good and i listened on am.
So you hooked up the car stereo without installing by powering it with the cigarette lighter and connecting the speaker wires to the aux input by using a severed RCA cable and an adapter for RCA to 3.5mm for the input. And how did you connect the car's antenna cable to the stereo?
I would imagine that the uk 88-108 mhz fm stereo band will slowly lose stations too, but thats more because of crap digital radio, i like analog radio, im a stick in the mud lol.
+zx8401ztv same with me I still rely on analog radio. But in my area, capital FM is pretty weak so I listen to radio 1 on fm
I'm 55 and still miss the days of music on AM radio.
1230 AM out of Rhode Island is still tranmitting CQUAM.
It would be nice if they still used it here but they all turned off the stereo encoder and put their stereo feed as an HD2 hd3 multi cast with their sister station FM MUX
It appears, from the comments, that there still are a few stations that broadcast in AM stereo. I only ever remember one station in Calgary that broadcast AM stereo in the early 1980s.
Apparently there are a few stations but none around the Vancouver area. They all shut their am stereo signals off
@@12voltvids I don't recall seeing many AM radios with stereo capability in car radios or boombox stereos. Without receivers, there would be no point in broadcasting in AM stereo.
@@Abitibidoug there used to be. And stereo was included in a lot of factory car radios back in the 80s. I used to have a 86 Toyota Cressida 8:00 a.m. stereo with a wideband button so it sounded really good. Aftermarket companies made them too Phillips had an AM stereo FM stereo cassette deck. I had a Sony in my car that would receive all four systems. The thing that really hurt AM stereo in the early days was the FCC. They decided to let the market choose which format would be used to broadcast. That was an absolute disaster. Radio stations were generally bound to use the system that they're transmitter builder was offering. If you had a Harris transmitter you were stuck on the Harris system if you had a Motorola transmitter Motorola. All five systems initially required specific radios. There were two main transmission systems that were employed when was the Khan / hazeldine system that used independent side bands. Then there was the other threw systems Motorola Harris and Magnavox which used a combination of amplitude and phase modulation. Even though they work ed on the same principle they did it differently each having side advantages over the others. One had the best sound quality but resulted in slight distortion on mono radios another had the best separation but with subject to interference from sky waves and the third offered a slight compromise on range and fidelity but offered the best compatibility with mono radios. The independent side band was it interesting system because you could use two mono radios tune one slightly higher and one slightly lower and the basic detector would favor either the upper or the lower side band so you could get the stereo effect which is using two radios but no improvement and Fidelity doing that because I regular radio was not really a high fidelity device but with a proper stereo receiver with wide band it actually sounded pretty good. Unfortunately with four incompatible systems that really hurt the roll out because if the station you wanted to listen to was using a system different than the radio that you owned you could only receive that station and model. In my location there were stations broadcasting and Motorola, Harris and Khan. Of course Canada followed the Americans on this and allowed all the systems. Canada however did make the decision earlier than the Americans to adopt one system and all the stations had to switch to Motorola or cease broadcasting the stereo. Most of them were using Motorola but one that was not switched off their stereo. Finally the FCC made the decision to go with one system but that was like closing the Barn door after all the horses have escaped. when stations that had already heavily invested in one of the formats found that the equipment they were using was no longer legal to use and they either had to invest in more money or switch it off guess what they did. I think I am stereo would have been a great success had back in the early 80s when they rolled it out they had gone with one format regardless of which broadcast format they went with and they pick one format it would have been a success. Think of the mess that would have happened with television if during the transition from black and white to color they allowed the different proposed systems of the day to go on the air. There was more than one system there was the CBS system which used a spinning color wheel spun in front of your picture tube to display red green and blue sequentially. That was one of the original systems proposed in fact that's what they used in the first color broadcast from the Moon if you remember watching the astronauts bouncing around on the moon with their space suits strobing different colors in the reflection from the sun. Could you imagine having a big box sitting in your living room about three times the size of the screen to house this big spinning glass wheel of color pains to display the red green and blue frames as they were being broadcast? they formed the ntsc or the national television systems committee to come up with a compatible system that every broadcaster would have to adhere to. Have they done something similar when AM stereo was first being deployed it would probably be a lot more stations that were still broadcasting in AM stereo today and it'd be a lot more radios available. What's the Motorola system was declared the only system to use Motorola was making am decoder chips that were only pennies and any manufacturer could use them but it was a little bit late at that point that decision needed to have been made before the first equipment was installed. now broadcasters can still broadcast today on stereo there's nothing stopping them from it and there's a station in the states that broadcast music I forget their call signs off hand but their AM stereo stream is available online to listen to. And by a.m. stereo stream I mean they have an AM receiver sitting in their studio receiving the signal off air and putting that on the internet so you can actually listen to the quality of an AM station and it sounds great. I just tripped across their video last week on RUclips and watch their studio tour and their transmitter tour and then went to their website to listen to what was on air
@@12voltvids Wow, myself and other viewers here thank you for the thorough explanation. That's more than I could find anywhere else. As you say, there should have been one standard format, like there was for CDs in 1983.
Actually it is a Cushcraft AP8 antenna I use.
Back in the day, there used to be a lot of am stations that broadcast music. Unfortunately, think that era passed before AM stereo was available...
AM stereo hit Canada in about 1982 or 3. All the music stations were broadcasting in stereo. I have severall air check tapes and a sticker from 1040Kicks CKKS. That sticker is stuck to an old microwave oven (still works too) that I am hanging onto just for the sticker. The first time I ever won anything from a radio station was 1040 back in I think 86 or so when they signed on with their new rock format. When the station first went on air they were MOR or middle of the road type music and they were the first AM stereo station in the Vancouver market (because they were brand new).
When they changed formats they had a contest where they would just phone somone random landline that was listed in the phone book. (cell phones back in 86 were brand new, and only realtors, lawyers, doctors ect could afford them)
They would say on the air, that they were going to make a random call sometime and if you answered with "The phrase that pays" which was "1040 Kicks" they gave away 1040.00! I was working for the TV shop and had just gone home for lunch. I was in an apartment at the time and as I was unlocking my door the phone started ringing. Nobody would normally be calling me during the week at that time so I answered 1040 kicks and all hell broke loose on the other end. I won the 1040.00 prize. They recorded the call, as music was still playing on the radio. This is how they made it difficult to win, because they had already made the call when t hey would announce that they were going to make the call. They played it back a few minutes later, and I had to arrange to get the cash picked up at the studio, because my boss wouldn't give me time off to go pick it up in person. So my girlfriend took my ID and claimed my prize. Back in those days that was about 3 months rent, so that was a lot of money.
I listened to that station every day until they changed formats. Now they are a 24/7 sports station. Still a 50,000 watt flame thrower, but not in stereo anymore.
Too bad because sports sounds great in stereo. They were broadcasting in stereo (sports) until about 5 years ago when the property that the transmitter was on was sold, and they had to relocate the antenna and transmitter building to the other side of t he highway. When they rebuilt they co-loacted 2 50KW Am transmitters, 1040 and 1410 another sports station in the same building sharing the 7 new towers. Sports sounded great in stereo as even though the announcers were in mono, they had the crowd atmosphere sound in full stereo, and it really added to the realism of the game. I miss those days.
Anyway AM stereo used to be on all the stations here, now none of the locals have the AM exciter running anymore. All the music stations are on FM. They all sound the same. Either playing modern crap, or rehashing the same 100 classic rock tracks over and over. Puts me off listening to the radio, so I spend my days listening to news sports and talk.... On AM radio. Sure would sound nice in stereo. The country station isn't bad for a change, but if I want real music, then I have the CBC in the evening when they play Jazz and Blues, or listen to NPR out of the states through all the static.
Yep. And had AM stereo been around in the mid-to-late '70s, wonder if WABC and WLS, to name just two, would've still been playing music. Terrible loss, that.
what are the most distant stations you can pick up how far? for me it would be Spain or Africa.
I do this with AM HD Radio. I never get a lock. But it’s seen stations very far away. Sangean.
I'm going to string a really long wire into mine and see if i can pick up any distant stations at night after everyone turns their plasma TVs off.
AM stereo stations are becoming as rare as hen's teeth.
Am stations in general are becoming an endangered species.
WOW! Never heard of all this crazy stuff. Is/was there any AM stereo station in Germany ever?
It was great while it lasted.
Dave - Here is a list of AM stations that broadcast AM Stereo, not sure how current it is (not my site, just an internet find): meduci.com/stations.html ~Jack, VEG
an UNUN might give you better reception from a long wire antenna.
WMTR in Morristown NJ is in stereo. Cool oldies station
Cool. It was a great format. Sounds so much better than the siriusly bad SXM crap that they actually expect us to pay for. (No I don't BTW. It cam in my new car and once the trial was done they were done)
12voltvids i pay for SiriusXM. Cannot deal with commercials anyone
@@paulnadratowski3942
To each his own. I have 23,000+ tracks on the SD card in the car, and get commercial free music on my cable package so I don't hear commercials. I listen to news and talk radio so I find out what is going on. XM here in Canada works out to 21.00 a month after the 14.5% royalty tax and government taxes on top. I get a nice cable package for that. In my old car I got sucked into a 500 lifetime package. The radio died after 3 years and they refused to transfer the "lifetime" package over because it was the lifetime of the radio. Now had I totaled the car or if it had been stolen they would have transferred it but because it was a radio failure after warranty they said too bad so sad. When I switched to XM just an error code came up with instructions to call XM. The rep said it was a module failure and I would have to buy another one. When I mentioned I had a lifetime sub I was informed they no longer offer that package and it could not be reactivated even though he is looking at the screen that showed I had paid for a lifetime service. Explained it was the lifetime of the radio and the radio has failed. So I said f&-+ em.
Got the new car and over the 3 months of free service I bet I didn't listen to more than about 10 hours. Same songs in same rotation terrible sound. I just leave my memory card playing and I never know what is going to come up next but it is all good.
12voltvids cool. My new VW has a space for a sim card. I am too damn lazy to use it. Lol. To each his own. I use AM and FM for local stuff... but music... SiriusXM.
Put up a miniwhip antenna and be surprised.
I wonder if some of the same AM stations that used to broadcast AM Stereo are now broadcasting in HiDef (HD Radio). We have a handful of AM station in Seattle area using digital HD.
Believe it or not, most modern HD radios can decode AM stereo as well.
Interesting. I would think that the few AM stations that used AM stereo would have converted to HD instead.
HD Radio doesn’t mean Hi-Def. It was something iBiquity made up to piggy back onto HDTV’s nomenclature.
Got a realistic am stereo head unit
Too bad that AM Steteo didn't succeed.
This was the fault of the FCC not picking a standard. The same thing happened with VHS vs Beta, and Bluray vs HD-DVD.
The FCC blew it then, and they did it again with Serius and XM.
With the later, Seruis and XM both used different satellites, and different technology, and you were basically locked into one or the other depending on what radio your car maker was going to make a factory option.
With satellite radio, the 2 companies merged, and now share common programming, but their operating expenses are much higher because they have to maintain 2 incompatible signals for the 2 types of radios that are in use.
With AM stereo they had 4 different incompatible systems. Only Sony made a custom chip that could handle all 4 systems. Had the FCC had balls, they would have picked one of the 4 proposed systems, stations would put in that encoder, all the radios would be compatible, and we would probably have plenty of AM stereo stations today rather than the odd one that comes in when the skip is rolling.
My solution to AM stereo as far as testing my radios goes was to build myself an AM stsreo low power transmitter. Works great for testing all old AM radios I repair.
First order of business. Take the non-dimmable CFL bulb out of the dimmer socket.
What non dimmable CFL?
@@12voltvids I was saying that because you have a lot of hum in your area.
@@brentfisher902
You know why it hums?
It doesn't know the words.
Power lines and DSL phone lines cause much noise on the hf bands. Plasma TVs too. Still lots of those noise generators still in use.
i wanna live there
There's some certain AM stations that can broadcast on Stereo, but we may never know which radio stations have.
I never understand the purpose of AM stereo. Always thought it was a waste of time b/c AM in my city back in the 80's when AM stereo became available were talk, sports & oldies. No need for stereo for that stuff.
Back in the 80's where I live we had 3 rock and roll AM stations, LG73, 1040 Kicks, and CFUN 1410.
They were top 40 and hits stations. The FM rock stations were hard rock, and classic rock. Those stations are still on the air now. 2 of them are sports and one is a traffic station.
There was also an oldies station (they just went sports to become the 3rd full time sports radio station) a news talk, and a news station. They were all in stereo, and the sound even for talk was better because they were using stereo microphones in the studio.
I rather liked AM stereo when it was on, because the sound was warmer than the harsh FM sound, and it didn't picket fence like the FM channels do.
When listening in the car the compression they used made the music sound superior to FM. Everyone I know that heard it agreed that it did sound better. Even at home, it just had a warmer less harsh sound. Like a vinyl record into a vacuum tube amp.
In the 1980s, believe it or not, some AM stations with spoken word formats did flip to stereo. KYW 1060 in Philadelphia had an all news format, and they played this cool teletype sound effect behind the newscaster. In retrospect, the whole thing sounds like a gimmick. Some years later, I heard that a motivation for broadcasting AM stereo on stations like KYW was so that the commercials would stand out.
Central Ohio Dipper
Oldies from the 60s were recorded in stereo. Am stereo was not just 2 channels it was wide IF bandwidth to push the frequency response up to 15KHZ which gave am a fertility on par with FM. Not every radio manufacture put in wideband IF but most did. The FCC dropped the ball by allowing 4 incomparable formats. Had they decided on a single format from day 1 we would probably be listening to every station in stereo to this day.
klafong1
It was about the improving the sound quality to try and save am from fm competition. It should have worked but tye 4 incomparable formats killed it. By the time the FCC got off their ass and selected Motorola standard and then ordered all the stations that used one of the other 3 to switch most stations said FU FCC and went back to mono. With the roll out of digital radio many stations have started placing the digital carrier onto the am carrier as a phase shift key encoded carrier. So no more analog stereo for most stations.
It’s still AM and still sounds like s$&t
Actually am stereo sounded great. Very much like FM but no pocket fencing. Better than serius xm. A good radio had a wide band if. Amax was even better up to 19khz frequency response.
Wow, I'm the first commenter!
That's incredible !! Congrats
Wow I can't believe USA still uses AM today. Here in the UK we have no AM stations, there's only about 1 AM station in the UK.
HitNation Radio What? Absolute Radio, BBC Radio 5, BBC Radio 4, BBC Radio Wales, BBC Radio Scotland, BBC Radio Ulster, Lyca Radio and there are even more small stations. Most of them can be received at nighttime where I live in Western Germany.