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This post is really for Loopnode.

At night, I can turn on the radio in my vehicle and pick up AM radio stations from as far away as Chicago. Tonight I was driving through South Carolina and listening to 650 WSM which is the "blowtorch" country station out of Nashville. I tired of that and switched over to a station from Chicago where the big topic was a traffic jam on lakeshore due to a U2 concert getting over.

Skipping is a phenomena unique to AM in the broadcast radio world.



Actually under certain atmospheric conditions FM & TV will skip, but it's most prevalent in AM. The idea behind assigning a number of stations as 50Kw clear-channel stations (as opposed to the company Clear Channel) was done by the FCC as a way of being able to communicate with large areas of the country during wartime or major disasters. Stations like WGN in Chicago, WSM in Nashville, WABC in NYC, WJR in Detroit, WBZ in Boston or WCCO in Minneapolis can be heard in 30-40+ states during night-time broadcasting. During WW-2, WLW in Cincinnatti was allowed to have 500Kw in an effort to be able to reach the entire US. It is known that Hitler used to complain about "The bastards in Cincinnatti" because the station was so powerful on skywave that it would drown out some of his speaches in Germany.