Chuck

At night, it's less ionized.

So there's, for some reason, AM radio signals can bounce off of it easier and, like you said, end up down in Mexico, for goodness sake.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Which is pretty cool.

For that reason, though, that's why they stopped transmitting at night, a lot of them.

Like, I'm with you.

I don't know if they still do or not.

Seems like the kind of thing that maybe was licked, but it also seems so fundamental that maybe it's still a problem.

But there were some stations that were designated clear channels.

They were allowed to broadcast 24 hours a day, and they were spread out both physically around the country and in Canada and Mexico, and also spread out on the dial so that their signals wouldn't interfere with one another when they traveled really far distances.

And one of the reasons why they had AM stations designated to operate 24 hours a day is, again, part of that public good, which was a service that AM radio offers that is kind of overlooked a lot here in the United States, which is it is like a national security alert system, essentially.

We'll talk a little more about that later, but that's why the Clear Channel thing is a thing.

Right.

And to be clear, I didn't even mean that.

Not to be confused with former iHeartMedia company, Clear Channel.

No, but I bet that's where they get their name.

Man, that'd be a real coincidence, huh?

Wasn't that the name of the city that was built on rock and roll?

Clear Channel?