Why Does DC Have More FM Talkers Than Nearly Any Other Market?

[gr8oldies]

Most of the talk stations in the DC Metro have moved away from AM, mainly because fewer people bother with AM anymore.

AM coverage has always been bad in DC.

 

[101tm]

Part of the reason it may seem like there are more spoken word/talk stations are on FM in DC is because it is a market that doesn’t have a lot of commercial FM signals compared to most markets of similar size.

 

[Joseph_Gallant]

AM coverage has always been bad in DC.

Another reason: Most Washington area AM stations established their current transmitter sites and directional patterns many decades ago, at a time when the Virginia suburbs to the west of D.C. were sparsely populated.

As Gr8Oldies points out, AM coverage in the market has always been bad in parts of the market, mostly missing those Virginia suburbs just to the west of the Beltway. Had those suburbs been as densely populated in the 1920's, 1930's, and 1940's as they are now, AM stations that beam their signals to the East (as most Washington AM stations do) might have established transmitter sites in Virginia, to the West of the District.