I disagree Don, Those little local stations, running a KW or less are the only ones left worth listening to, but they don't make a lot of money. Forcing them to change bands would force most of them to either sell off to some Media-Mogul or go dark. Frankly, I'd rather the Big Conglomerate owned stations moved up and out. Especially with their crappy, Dick, Dork, and a Doe cookie cutter programming styles...
You are indeed fortunate if you have any local AM stations at <1KW that run any kind of unique programming worth listening to.
We have four local AM'ers in this area. They have become little more than repeaters, rebroadcasting what is beamed down by satellite. Of these, one is all-sports and another is a Black gospel bible-beater. I hear stories of how this has happened all over the country. Most of these stations run unattended. The "local" programming you hear is via "voice tracking", where listeners are deceived into thinking that what they are listening to is locally originated but in reality it is syndicated from somewhere on the other side of the continent, with commercials and local announcements (also produced in distant studios) inserted into the feed by automation.
Only one of our local stations, the one that has been running since 1941, has any local programming in their own studios at all, and they still run hours of satellite feed per day. When they gave me the remains of a BTA-1R, one of the guys showed me around the studio and explained how the whole operation works. There are several big dishes on the premises, with several computers and very little audio production equipment in the "production room".
I don't think many of these small stations could afford to hire a full staff to run their entire operation locally, along with a chief engineer and full office staff.
The problem is too many radio stations. A few decades ago, a town of 10K or 20K inhabitants might have one or two local broadcast stations, and typically at least one of those was daytime only. Then, in the 60's and 70's the FCC started licensing about anyone who could generate enough cash to build a station, to the point that little burgs with a population of 5,000 typically had more than one station, and the competition got much worse when FM finally caught on with the public. So a town of 50K inhabitants now has 5 or 6 stations competing for what little advertising revenue is available, with the vast majority of the audience listening to FM. I'm surprised that small AM's have managed to hang on this long. To exacerbate the problem, the AM band has become so jam-packed with signals at night that about the only thing audible is a handful of clear channel blowtorches spouting political progaganda and any local that might happen to have its transmitter within a 5-mile radius.
There are a few exceptions, such as WSM, but about all it has left is its famous country music format. I can remember when they played Texico Opera on Saturday afternoon, had classical music in the evenings, and broadcast news programs. I can recall their running NBC's
Monitor all weekend. Now it is nearly all country music and football games. They do run national news every hour or so. I am not aware of it if they have shifted to a talk radio format yet.
When I first started teaching school, I would tune in to a local AM station to hear snow day announcements. They also carried locally breaking news events and weather. By the time I retired, local snow-day, weather and news announcements were non-existent on any of the radio stations. Instead, this information was disseminated via the scrolling strip along the bottom of the screen from regional TV stations.
I suspect a small local AM station might be able to make it, if the satellite robot repeaters that are currently jamming the band and syphoning off sparse advertising revenue all went dark, and they were willing to offer something beyond the syndicated programming you hear on the FM band.
The only FM stations that I can pick up that are worth listening to, are the three regional NPR stations and a couple of university radio stations, all located at the bottom end of the band, and the only AM I ever actually listen to is the 10,000 watt NPR news/talk station on 1430 in Nashville, 50 miles away. They are inaudible until a couple of hours after sunrise and begin to fade into oblivion a couple of hours before sunset. I believe they cut power to 1 kw at night, but they are long past being buried in the QRM by then.
One thing that will make it too expensive for small AM's to move to the proposed expanded FM band will be to require them to broadcast digitally using "HD Radio®", because of the inflated cost of the equipment and the licensing fees they will have to pay to the digital monopoly. But the propagation characteristics of the AM band make it more suitable for large clear channel stations with skywave coverage, particularly suited for long distance travellers, since it is impossible to keep a radio station tuned in on a car radio on a long trip for more than an hour or so at time, unless one goes to satellite radio.
Remember the station in Elizabeth, NJ, that first opened up the expanded AM band, and was entertainment quality every evening over half the continent? And IIRC, they ran only 1 kw at night.
