[George from New England]

Also killing AM radio is the speed of processors and chips. They radiate noise in the AM spectrum. The FCC must be allowing higher and higher limits on this noise. Every chip in a car running stuff, radiates this noise, it gets to overwhelm the AM receiver just feet away from the chips.

[Myrddin]

Before I left San Diego, I would listen to Rush on KOGO AM 600. I did that for years, then suddenly one morning the KOGO signal was overwhelmed with horrible hash. This started happening daily at 9 AM Pacific. I smelled a rat. After some investigation, I tracked the problem to my neighbor across the street. He had purchased some special machine tools that needed 3 phase AC. We didn't have 3 phase wired to our residential area, so he resorted to a single phase to 3 phase converter. That was the source of the wretched hash coming in via my AC line. We shared a common transformer.

Having identified the source of the problem, I carried a portable AM radio over to my neighbor's house and explained the problem. We walked out the garage and switched the converter on/off and definitively identified the source of the problem. I provided him a list of filters that he could pick up at Western Radio that would filter the noise before it headed out to the transformer. End of problem. He just didn't know about the problem or means to resolve it.