WBTN Bennington VT
WDCR Hanover NH
Last I heard, WBTN (AM) sounded just like any other boring commercial AM station. I mean, Bill O'Reilly? Snore. At least their web site indicates they have some locally-programmed material too. And the other day, when I passed through the area, WDCR was simply repeating its boring cookie-cutter active rocker commercial FM sister station, as it apparently always does in the summer. I wonder if they do anything more interesting when school's in. At least Yale's WYBC (AM) was playing something vaguely interesting, but still pretty commercial-sounding -- I think I heard some early '90s modern rock or some such.
I live just outside a college campus which had a low-power AM. In fact, I could only pick it up because my radio was plugged into the wall. I was told a portable radio wouldn't work.
This is called a "carrier-current" station if I'm not mistaken. It's not a "real" AM station that broadcasts over the air -- its signal is only carried through the electrical power system of the dorms (and not always all of the dorms either, because they have to spend more money to get it out to all dorms' electrical systems).
Lots and lots of colleges have carrier-current AM stations, sometimes as training grounds for the "real" (FM) station at that college, and sometimes just because there's no room on the radio dial for a "real" station for that college.
One benefit is that a CC station doesn't need to be licensed by the FCC and doesn't have to follow FCC language restrictions. Intense profanity? No problem.
Last I heard, lots of schools in NYC had carrier-current stations, because how could these stations fit onto the actual broadcast dial with the incredibly crowded NYC landscape?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrier_current
(I think that's a pretty incomplete list of CC AM stations, unless an enormous number of them have ceased to exist in the past 10 years, which is entirely possible.)
Incidentally, my alma mater, Drew University in Madison NJ, had a carrier-current AM station way back in the early '80s, before they got a 10-watt FM station. They story was that the CC AM station was called WERD and supposedly it leaked out to the surrounding community somehow, and offended a lot of the townies, presumably due to lots of cursing. I was at Drew in the '90s and we coveted those WERD call letters. "Drew" spelled backwards is much funnier than boring old WMNJ. In any case, lots of abuse was heaped upon WMNJ (one DJ used to say, on the air, something like "I can get up on the roof and whiz farther than our signal goes, and that's our new motto!") but I used to try to tell them, "Hey at least we're not stuck with carrier-current!" But nobody at Drew knew what that was.
I wouldn't mess with an AM signal. Not even if it was free. Its still a major power bill.
True, a real AM broadcast signal eats up gigantic amounts of power, and most modern music doesn't sound very good on AM. Oldies, some classic rock, classic country, nostalgia, etc., sound OK on AM, but most college stations aren't playing a lot of that (except for some classic rock). But webcasting is getting way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way more expensive (see the "Save Internet Radio" link above) and so broadcast AM may NOW look more attractive after all.