I never stopped listening to AM radio! I started in the late 50's - mainly on a birthday present - a large red leather cased 6 transistor Emerson with a big 'Magic Wand' rotating handle with a large ferrite rod loopstick antenna. It ran off two parallel connected #276 big square cardboard boxed 9V batteries and it's transistors were in sockets. I couldn't afford the hard to find & expensive batteries, so I taped together 3 D cells in series in each battery position to gain much more capacity at a lower cost. It picked up far better than my homebrew crystal sets - from our apt in Bayside, Long Island (NYC outskirts - loads of stations!). I followed it with homebrew receivers - even short wave - that started a life-long hobby - which still persists to this day (I'm listening to Radio Australia as I type this.) on a British designed & built Lowe HF-225 communications receiver on it's 10 kHz bandwidth with it's synchronous AM detector and clean ~1.5 Watts of audio driving a Klipsch KB-15 speaker. I still listen to AM radio, too - daytime-only WGAD 930 has good oldies, but whacked by splatter from a local over-modulated 50kW station (I got my commercial First Class Radiotelephone License in 1968 while I was at Auburn U.. I was chief engineer at one AM and several FM stations over the years.). Yeah, I like AM radio!
