@mattblaze With modern modulation techniques, I'd think you could get some pretty decent bandwidth even at those frequencies for long-distance data comms. Wouldn't be AM anymore, but...

@mattblaze I had a Mickey Mouse transistor radio as a kid that I'd keep under the pillow to listen to at night -- something of a feat, since it was about an inch and a half thick. Mostly I listened to WIP-AM (which was music then) and KYW (still news after all these years), but I would tune around seeing what I could find. One night I was surprised to hear a Chicago Blackhawks game -- being broadcast from Chicago without a repeater! Overcast nights for the win.

The rapid decline in recent years of local content on the mediumwave bands has considerably reduced the romantic mystery of tuning around and seeing what you find. It's mostly now a sterile mix of mass-produced, syndicated right wing talk, sports, and so on. But there are still a handful of stubbornly local stations producing their own programming.