Effectively AM in Europe is almost dead. There’s hardly anything on either of the AM bands anymore,
There are two bands used in Europe:
Medium Wave (MW) 531–1,602 kHz which has 9 kHz channel spacing, which is fairly similar to AM in the U.S. and Canada. It’s allocated as 119 channels.
Long Wave (LW) 153 to 279 kHz also with 9 kHz spacing - this was never used for broadcasting in North America.
Historically, most of the big stations were on Medium Wave, aiming to cover domestic audiences in a particular country. All the old public service broadcasters and some commercial stations were there.
Long Wave tends to propagate much further, so it was often used with single, very high power transmitters, either to cover awkward topography (RUV in Iceland for example used it even though the listenership was almost entirely domestic. In others it provided back up coverage to supplement FM and Medium Wave (BBC Radio 4, France Inter, RTE Radio 1 etc all did this) or to have international reach.
Some LW stations also carry time signal. BBC Radio 4 Long Wave for example was used to control day/night electric meters in the U.K., sending a code to “radio teleswitch” devices that flipped meters between day and night registers. France used the France Inter LW signal to carry a digital time signal which was used by many systems like railway ticket machine, bus ticket validators, parking meters, etc
Several of the 1960s pop stations used LW as a way of getting pan European coverage for commercial radio - Radio Luxembourg (RTL), Atlantic 252, Europe 1, Radio Monte Carlo (RMC) and quite a few others did this. It was a way of getting commercial radio beyond their borders, both to make money and in many cases, to bypass neighbouring countries’ excessively tight licensing regimes that gave monopolies or near monopolies to state owned broadcasters.
Some of the LW stations were extremely powerful transmitters. The USSR for example has several that reached way beyond 1.5 megawatts of radiated power. One even hit 2.5 megawatts, which was basically to cover their entire territory with just a few huge transmitters.
In Western Europe Radio Luxembourg hit 1.5 megawatts, but for rather more capitalist reasons- to get music radio and ads into lucrative markets.
There was a period of pirates and super pirates - unlicensed commercial stations, which included several quite literally broadcasting from ships at sea, which is where the name came from and others were broadcasting from land based stations, for example here in Ireland, from the Isle of Man and other places that didn’t have as draconian a listening regime or didn’t enforce one as heavily as certain bigger markets at the time.
They were interesting times. Plenty of info online about it if you’re ever interested in the history and a rather fun movie The Boat that Rocked was loosely based on super pirate ‘Radio Caroline’ and stories from several others - it’s not a documentary but it’s a fun watch with a lot of great music of the era and gives a sense of the industry as it was at the time in Britain anyway.
There are two bands used in Europe:
Medium Wave (MW) 531–1,602 kHz which has 9 kHz channel spacing, which is fairly similar to AM in the U.S. and Canada. It’s allocated as 119 channels.
Long Wave (LW) 153 to 279 kHz also with 9 kHz spacing - this was never used for broadcasting in North America.
Historically, most of the big stations were on Medium Wave, aiming to cover domestic audiences in a particular country. All the old public service broadcasters and some commercial stations were there.
Long Wave tends to propagate much further, so it was often used with single, very high power transmitters, either to cover awkward topography (RUV in Iceland for example used it even though the listenership was almost entirely domestic. In others it provided back up coverage to supplement FM and Medium Wave (BBC Radio 4, France Inter, RTE Radio 1 etc all did this) or to have international reach.
Some LW stations also carry time signal. BBC Radio 4 Long Wave for example was used to control day/night electric meters in the U.K., sending a code to “radio teleswitch” devices that flipped meters between day and night registers. France used the France Inter LW signal to carry a digital time signal which was used by many systems like railway ticket machine, bus ticket validators, parking meters, etc
Several of the 1960s pop stations used LW as a way of getting pan European coverage for commercial radio - Radio Luxembourg (RTL), Atlantic 252, Europe 1, Radio Monte Carlo (RMC) and quite a few others did this. It was a way of getting commercial radio beyond their borders, both to make money and in many cases, to bypass neighbouring countries’ excessively tight licensing regimes that gave monopolies or near monopolies to state owned broadcasters.
Some of the LW stations were extremely powerful transmitters. The USSR for example has several that reached way beyond 1.5 megawatts of radiated power. One even hit 2.5 megawatts, which was basically to cover their entire territory with just a few huge transmitters.
In Western Europe Radio Luxembourg hit 1.5 megawatts, but for rather more capitalist reasons- to get music radio and ads into lucrative markets.
There was a period of pirates and super pirates - unlicensed commercial stations, which included several quite literally broadcasting from ships at sea, which is where the name came from and others were broadcasting from land based stations, for example here in Ireland, from the Isle of Man and other places that didn’t have as draconian a listening regime or didn’t enforce one as heavily as certain bigger markets at the time.
They were interesting times. Plenty of info online about it if you’re ever interested in the history and a rather fun movie The Boat that Rocked was loosely based on super pirate ‘Radio Caroline’ and stories from several others - it’s not a documentary but it’s a fun watch with a lot of great music of the era and gives a sense of the industry as it was at the time in Britain anyway.
