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As a youngster I became fascinated with what was then a very simple hand-held AM “transistor radio”. That tiny radio didn’t even have an FM band, but it was magic to this young boy nonetheless.
Most radios back then were AM only and the few cars that even had radios in them were AM only as well.
When I was somewhere around 11 or 12 years old I removed an AM radio from a junked car and kept it on a table beside my bed. I would lay awake at night listening to WLS Radio out of Chicago, marveling at how I could listen to a radio station that was roughly 600 miles away from my home in Virginia.
The old car battery that powered that radio (which was pulled from the same junk car) would last for several nights on a single charge. Every time it died I would carry it out to the barn and charge it back up with the home-built battery charger my brother Roger had built from a washing machine motor and a generator that had been removed from – you guessed it – a junked car.
As programming on the FM band began to roll out to the masses the radio manufacturers started adding the FM option to their products, but it would still be several years before you could find anything “worth listening to” on FM.
But, as they say, times change. Nowadays most people listen to FM instead of AM in their vehicles, with more and more people switching to satellite radio by the day.
I guess I’m old-school when it comes to radio because I don’t have any plans to transition to satellite radio myself. It’s probably going to be FM (with a little bit of AM mixed in on occasion) for me as long as that option remains available.
Believe it or not, I still own a handheld AM/FM “transistor radio” but I rarely listen to it since the sound is so much better on larger stereo units, but I love having it around for the sake of nostalgia.
Well, the above is my personal history with AM/FM radios. The short video below offers a more detailed (and probably more interesting) history of that wonderful innovation. Watch, and enjoy.