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Comment by ixfo | Hacker News Reader

Definitely not working ones. As someone who ran an AM+FM station for 5 or so years not that long ago, 99% of listeners were FM, with very few AM listeners.

In another life I did work on broadcast censorship circumvention into places like China etc; the main concern at the time was that shortwave radios were becoming rare enough to make the traditional big SW/AM TX near borders kind of irrelevant, so focus was moving to online - Tor, et al - because people actually had that tech.

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> Definitely not working ones. As someone who ran an AM+FM station for 5 or so years not that long ago, 99% of listeners were FM, with very few AM listeners.

How can you possibly measure who’s is receiving your broadcast over the air signal?

The same way you measure everything else about broadcast - you find the people and ask them, aka "surveys".

Are AM listeners and FM listeners likely to find and respond to surveys in the same way? I would expect older more remote AM listeners would be under-represented in your survey.

There's a number of ways to try and avoid response bias - the most obvious would be to (a) work out roughly how many people are listening to AM radio at all, (b) go find some representative sample of people who are listening to AM radio and ask them what they're listening to, (c) scale your results proportionately. Nielsen specialises in this sort of research.

One way is to drive around listening for local oscillator radiation from homes and businesses. That was historically done more for tax enforcement purposes than market research, although I've heard anecdotes about billboards equipped with receivers tuned to survey the radios in passing cars.

Of course, now that chip-scale receivers with synthesized LOs are ubiquitous, intermediate frequencies are no longer limited to 455 kHz and 10.7 MHz, or even used at all. Consequently this method is no longer of much interest, but it worked for the better part of a century.

When you say not working, I think you mean not using. And an unused AM receiver could still be used at some point.

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