It would be a nice thing to do from several angles I think and would help drive interest in radio as a technology in general; as well as building transmitters and aerial systems, there's things like setting up an audio processing chain to get the best possible modulation and being a disc jockey which will always have a bit of a buzz from being on the 'real' radio. If valves and vintage equipment are involved it would be an interesting form of technology history preservation and 'living history', and there's also an environmental angle where old analogue radio receivers could be prevented from becoming e-waste.
There could be a minimal licencing regime to demonstrate the individual is not a complete numpty and a fee to PRS for music rights along the lines of how streaming works. Maximum power could be kept low especially at night to avoid interfering with countries in Europe where AM radio is still an active platform, and I don't think there'd need to be a lot of enforcement with respect to content since you'd only realistically be broadcasting to other anoraks. Additionally there's already precedent for non-profit stations where the medium of AM itself plays a role, for example former pirate Radio Caroline which uses it to keep its historic radio ship in operation.
Gherkins and even pickled onions glowed brilliantly. I set up a basic site to share the video we'd taken and details of the experiment, and shared it to B3ta. Sadly all lost to time.
That said, the food demodulating the signal into audible noise is badass.
(Vlasic is an American pickle brand.)
(a) a 50kW AM radio station with frequent and accurate traffic updates, often much better detail than what you can get from using google maps or waze or similar, and
(b) massive, frequent traffic problems and congestion at major bridge and tunnel locations.
It's still a very useful thing to have when driving and you don't need to take your eyes off the road at all.
I've seen at least on video of this being done with a wrench, where the RF current forms a visible arc through the air to the wrench.
1. On AM the radio energy literally pulses (the amplitude modulation) and thus the arcs of plasma will pulse too thus creating the audio noise. AM has a carrier wave that’s constant but the two sidebands of signal pulse from zero energy at silence to more power the louder the sound being transmitted. FM signals broadcast essentially the same power all the time since it’s the frequency and not the amplitude that’s changing.
2. Because the signal frequency is much lower on the AM broadcast bands the wavelength is much larger and thus the antennas are much bigger. On AM the tower itself is typically the antenna vs FM radio where the antenna is typically only a meter or two long at the top of a very tall tower. That’s what makes AM towers more dangerous as the tower can be carrying many kW of energy and if you touch it you’ll go zap zap. The towers typically sit on top of a ceramic insulator to insulate them from the ground whereas FM towers typically just are attached right to the ground (although with grounding straps for lightning protection).
Finally (some folks don’t always know this) you can operate AM on the frequencies typically used for FM… it’s just a mode and works on any frequency. Aviation radios operate on AM but in the VHF band near FM broadcast frequencies.