"Telamon" wrote in message
...

Don't give any of Eduardo's posts the benefit of the doubt. All that guy
does is spread BS in the news group. He does not know what he is talking
about. Nothing stops this guy from spewing his BS. He even has the
audacity to tell you what you can hear on your radio. Just ask him.


You still don't get it, do you.

If you take hundreds of thousands of listeners and millions of listening
incidents and plot the listening ZIP code on a map, and find that 95% of
them occur within the contour demarcating a particular signal strength, you
could then conclude that stations require a certain strength to get
listenership irrespective of the quality or appeal of the programming.

The contour within which nearly 95% of AM at home or at work listening
occurs is the 10 mv/m signal in urbanized areas. This is confirmed by
running the same study in multiple markets in the US.

Over time, the finite strength requirement is increasing, probably due to
increased man made interference such as more computers, CFLs and such. This
change is unrelated to the general decline in AM listening, which is a
separate issue.

While you are correct that many more stations can be heard at a location,
the fact that they have less than the accepted signal level for being
actually listened to is the key factor.

Many radio groups have studied this, and it is a key factor in establishing
a price for broadcast facilities. Personally, my department has looked at a
sample of 5 of the top 10 markets, 4 of the top 20 markets and an assortment
of markets outside the top 25 as a "control point" and verified this is true
using what amounts to a sample of several million diarykeepers over the last
10 years.

This is the way listeners behave in the real world. And this is the way
stations determine where to do promotions and place billboards and such.