Sign off your AM transmitter

Sign it off at night, save money:

Do you know that broadcasting 24/7 wastes energy?

Here are a few facts:

1. There are 4778 AM stations licensed in the United States, 4172 are authorized to operate at night
2. Between the hours of midnight to 6 am, those stations use a combined 119,368 kWh of electricity per day to transmit their programming. This does not include other loads needed at a transmitter facility such as air conditioning
3. This contributes 204,000 pounds or 102 tons of CO₂ to the atmosphere every day
4. Other environmental impacts include introducing 492 pounds of SO₂ and 415 pounds of NO_x to the atmosphere every day
5. This is the equivalent of 221,690 road miles or 10,408 gallons of gasoline every day
6. Many of these stations have antenna and or automated remote control systems that are operating out of tolerance creating massive interference problems
7. Almost all of these AM stations do not make any money operating from midnight to 6 am

See data and methodology to see how I arrived at these conclusions.

Are you throwing money away staying on the air?

Many many broadcasting companies are having problems in this tough economic time, Clear Channel Communications just laid off another 590 people, Cumulus Media is furloughing its employees for five days. Their stock is trading at $0.68, Citadel Broadcasting stock price is $0.04! These are huge broadcasting companies! Due to this and other budgetary constraints, most AM broadcasters use some type of automated satellite syndicated talk shows to fill in the programming schedule when live announcers are not there. The result is that most stations repeat the same 10-20 talk radio shows creating duplicate programming. The nighttime AM broadcast band is a mess of signals making it mostly un-listenable.

Listening to AM at night

This is a 1 minute .mp3 file of a regional AM frequency recorded at about 10pm. How many stations can you pick out? According to the FCC data base there are 68 stations on that frequency alone. The listening location is about 5 miles away from the transmitter site of a station transmitting with 1 KW power, can you guess which one?

Is anyone else listening?

Turning off the transmitter overnight

The FCC rules (CFR 73.1740(a)(1)) shows that commercial radio stations need to adhere to the following minimum operating schedules:

• Between the hours of 6 am to 6 pm local time, stations must be in operation two thirds of the total hours they are authorized to operate
• Between the hours of 6 pm to midnight, stations must be in operation two thirds of the total hours they are authorized to operate

Note that there are no requirements to operate between midnight and 6 am.

The average* class B AM station could save $1,676.00 per year by signing off between midnight and 6 am.

How much money can be saved by turning off your transmitter? That depends on how much you pay for electricity and what the transmitter power is in nighttime operation. You can use our calculator to get a rough estimate.

*see methods and data for the "average" class B station

AM stations that should not sign off

• If the station is selling advertising and making money during this daypart, do not sign off
• If the station is a LP-1 or LP-2 EAS station, you should not sign off or make arrangements to get out of the Local/State EAS
• If the station is serving your community of license with other important information such as storm closings, emergency weather, HAZMAT, etc, do not sign off
• Station has an older tube type transmitter or any of the following Harris brand transmitters; MW series, SX series, Gates series, Those type transmitters work better when they are on all the time in the station should probably not sign off