What is radio like in your country?

[jtur88]

The Canadian CRTC introduced Canadian music content regulations in 1963, but as far as I know, by 1969, they had pretty much been abandoned, and the station I was working at played whatever they wanted, and there was very little Canadian content. As you correctly stated, there were fewer stations in proportion to market size, so more stations were expected to program to a wider swath of the listeners. In the 70s, in St. John's (pop 250K) you could get exactly three radio stations on a good car radio in the daytime, all AM. Two commercial playing pop music with a few call-in talk shows, and the CBC. As for power, about half the AM stations in the US are 250 watts, which is the minimum. But in a place like Thunder Bay, once you are ten miles from downtown, there won't be another house for 200 miles, so there is nobody to reach with more power.

In 1969, the St. John's station I worked at was still doing bush radio broadcasts, programs in which personal messages were being aired, the only way to communicate with people out in about a hundred towns that had no roads nor telephone service, and mail took a week or two to crawl along the coast, and a month to Labrador in summer, not at all in winter. Messages to tell people how so and so was doing in the hospital, or reporting travel plans of when to be expected home. People from the outharbours visiting the city would take a taxi to the radio station, with handwritten messages to be broadcast to the folks back home. Four times a day, the locations of about 20 coastal passenger boats were announced, so people in the communities served would know when the boat was due to arrive. The radio station had brought Newfoundland's population into the 20th century, and it was still the only communications medium they had.