$ cd ..

Dial

Find the game on the radio

The Brewers, Packers, Bucks and Badgers on AM and FM: which station near you has the game, and whether it still comes in after sunset, when AM stations turn down and aim away. Worked out from each station's licence and towers, not from a dot on a map.

$ ./dial --wi # estimates from FCC data; stations change

THE DIAL

THE MAP

EVERY STATION WITH THE GAME

DialStationMilesDayNight
An estimate. Stations join and leave networks, and a team can move a game to another station when two of its flagship's teams play at once. If it matters, check the team's own list (Brewers, Packers, Bucks, Badgers) or tune in before the first pitch.

Why not just the nearest station

Because a 50,000-watt AM station 150 miles away can beat a small FM 20 miles away, and then lose to it an hour later. Radio reach depends on power, antenna height and aim, the frequency, the ground under the signal, and, for AM, the time of day. Distance alone gets most of those wrong.

AM is different after dark

In daylight an AM signal travels along the ground (the ground wave), and the ionosphere soaks up anything aimed at the sky. After sunset that absorbing layer fades, and AM signals start bouncing off the upper ionosphere and landing hundreds of miles away. That's how you hear Chicago and Nashville at night. It's also the problem: every station on your channel, from all over the country, comes in on top of your local one.

So the FCC makes most AM stations change at sunset. Some drop power: WTMJ goes from 50,000 to 10,000 watts. Many switch to a different set of towers that aims the signal away from other stations on the same channel. Some, the daytimers, sign off. And even a station at full power covers less at night, because the interference from the sky wave drowns its edges. This page draws both: the Day and After dark buttons on the map switch between the two coverage shapes. For a game that starts in daylight and runs past sunset, the board tells you if the best station changes partway through.

FM doesn't do any of that. It travels line of sight, a bit past the horizon, day and night alike. Many small AM stations now also run an FM translator, a low-power FM that repeats the AM. Those are listed as "relays" the AM station, and after dark they're often the better listen.

How the coverage is worked out

  • AM. For each station, its current licence from the FCC AM Query: power by day and by night, class, and tower site. Its directional pattern rebuilt from the tower array on file in the FCC's CDBS database: every tower's spacing, orientation, field ratio and phasing, added up the way the FCC computes a theoretical pattern, and scaled to the licensed RMS. Then, along 72 bearings from the site, the signal falls off by the ITU-R P.368 ground-wave curves, computed with the ITU's own GRWAVE program for that frequency, over the soil from the FCC's M3 ground conductivity map. Where the path crosses from one soil to another it uses Kirke's equivalent-distance method, the one the FCC's rules use for mixed paths (73.183).
  • FM. The FCC's own 60 dBu service contour for the station, from the FCC's contour files, when the licence hasn't changed since that file was made. For the ten or so stations licensed since, a curve fitted to the contours of 1,588 licensed stations around Wisconsin (median error 8%).
  • Solid and fringe. By day, AM is solid to 2 mV/m and fringe to 0.5 mV/m, the FCC's rural service level. At night the levels go up with the station's class, because interference rather than noise sets the limit: 5 and 1.5 mV/m for a Class B like WTMJ, 8 and 3 for the small local stations. FM is solid inside the 60 dBu contour and fringe out to 50 dBu, which in a car is still listenable.
  • Signal bars say where your spot sits between the two lines along its bearing from the tower: four well inside solid, one near the fringe edge, "maybe" just past it.

What it gets wrong

  • Hills and buildings. The FM contours include terrain, but the AM ground-wave doesn't, and neither knows about your garage, a valley, or a steel bridge.
  • Interference at night is estimated by class, not computed from every co-channel station in North America. Some nights the sky is kinder than this page, some nights worse.
  • Old data. The FCC's tower data here dates from January 2024 and its FM contours from 2021. Every station is checked against its current licence, and where the power has changed since, the pattern is scaled and the page says so. A rebuilt array wouldn't show up.
  • The networks change. The affiliate lists were read from the teams' pages on Oct. 25, 2026. The Bucks' official list hadn't been updated since 2023, so several of its stations are marked unconfirmed. The Badgers don't split football from basketball in their list, and a few of their stations carry only one.
  • The playoffs. For the World Series, the Brewers' radio call stays on WTMJ and the Brewers Radio Network. ESPN Radio has its own national broadcast, which some stations carry instead.

Why not just stream it

Often you can't. Leagues keep the internet rights for games, so a station's stream usually cuts the play-by-play, or blocks it outside the team's area. The radio signal itself has no such rule: if you can hear it, you can listen.

Sources

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