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There are some technical inaccuracies in this article.

While Sarnoff did try to kill FM as a threat (more NIH than anything) The move to 88-108 had some other good technical reasons - the higher frequency is less prone to skip, multipath, and tropospheric ducting. When the band opens on 6m (where the original band was) stations hundreds of miles away can swamp local traffic. Because Television isnt subject to the capture effect, there are less issues with it with analog TV. The interference of remote stations at the frequency it happens on low band VHF, would have sunk FM in the long term.

AM Radio Bandwidth. The original allocated channel bandwidth for AM allowed closer to 11-12kc of audio bandpass, with 8-10 being pretty common - the quality was more a function of how the lines feeding the network traffic to the station and the station to transmitter link were conditioned, and often well into the 70's the STL link was a leased conditioned line from the telco.

I do not disagree that RCA used its market position as holder of most of the radio related patents to shut out Armstrong, and it was/is despicable - but not all of the bad thind that happened were just malicious to be malicious.




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