Funny that you mention that. I haven't listened to AM radio in a dog's age, but turned it on in the car on Monday to see if there was something I was interested in on the news.
I listened to it while I was riding with my uncle. He's a truck driver, so I spend some of my vacations riding with him. Sometimes he wants to listen to talk and news while he drives and sometimes he wants to listen to music, so he listens to AM half of the time and FM half of the time.
I usually don't listen to AM when I'm by myself, but one night I listened to it while driving home from work. I heard an English-language program which I thought was interesting. The hosts were talking about listening to long-distance radio stations that are normally out-of-range for them. I haven't heard their program before, but then the radio station announced its call sign, which began with W, so it was from the USA. I was listening to hosts talk about listening to long distance radio stations on a radio station that was normally too far away for me to hear.
Skywave propagation. The upper layer of the atmosphere, the ionosphere, becomes an almost perfect reflector at night for most of the frequencies that are used by the AM band, so the signal "bounces" back down. I used to pick up Radio Port Moresby from Sydney at night when I was in my teens.
I listen to it sometimes. When I was a kid, I listened to it on snowy mornings hoping they would announce my school was closed for the day. My own kids won't get to enjoy snow days, though. They've been replaced with e-learning days.
Very rarely now. All the services I normally listen to are on FM.
I've also tried the on-line BBC Sounds service but had problems logging into it, much more likely from my PC not being compatible with whatever background system the BBC uses (WIN-10 based?), than from any fault in the service itself.
I have a DAB (Digital Audio Broadcast) radio but have not tried using it. I took one look at the operating instructions and decided I could not be bothered with the mind-boggling complexity of setting the thing up, simply to listen to programmes that continue to be transmitted perfectly well on real, frequency-modulated radio waves. DAB is also said to suffer from a strange weakness - it cannot be relied on for time-keeping due to a (variable?) delay between transmission and reception!
SpunkySenior 