radio 17,186 U.S. radio station records from TidyTuesday's 2022-11-08 release show a median frequency of 101 MHz, a high of 1,700 kHz on AM, and Country as the most common format — yet News/Talk stations sit 1,039 kHz above the median because of their historic AM placement. The station license table is a spectrum map, not a ratings book. Call sign WEUP leads the frequency ranking, Country leads format share, and the top five call signs account for 34 percent of aggregate frequency — a concentration artifact that reflects dial extremes rather than audience consolidation. Frequency and format answer different questions: one measures where stations sit on the electromagnetic spectrum, the other describes what they broadcast. FREQUENCY BY CALL SIGN FREQUENCY BY CALL SIGN WJCC appears near 1,700 kHz at the high end of the call-sign frequency cut, with neighbors such as KGED near 1,680 kHz. These are upper-AM coordinates, not audience-size claims. Grouping by call sign exposes how the metric varies across licensed identities — a map of where stations sit on the spectrum, not which morning shows win their cities. WHO SITS AT THE TOP TOP CALL SIGN WJCC leads at 1,700 kHz, with 1,695 kHz as the median among the top dozen. The entire top band is a tight cluster of high-AM assignments. The finding is the tightness itself: the top of frequency is a narrow technical neighborhood, while format diversity lives on a different axis. FREQUENCY BY FORMAT FREQUENCY BY FORMAT Box plots by format — Country, News/Talk, Sports, Classic Hits, and related labels — show whether frequency consensus is shared or contested across programming types. Country leads station count but does not automatically own the highest dial positions. Format is culture; frequency is spectrum. Confusing the two produces false stories about which genres rule the airwaves. WHO BEATS THE MEDIAN — AND WHO TRAILS FREQUENCY VS MEDIAN BY FORMAT News/Talk sits 1,039 kHz above the median; Contemporary Christian trails by about 9. News/Talk's elevation reflects its heavy presence on AM frequencies far above the FM-centered median of 101 MHz. The gap is a band-plan story as much as a format story. Talk radio's historic AM home pulls its frequency distribution into a different universe from music formats clustered on FM. CONCENTRATION ON THE DIAL THE TOP 5 CALL SIGN ENTRIES ACCOUNT FOR 34 PERCENT OF THE AGGREGATE FREQUENCY The top five call-sign entries account for 34 percent of aggregate frequency in the working cut — a concentration statistic that reflects how large the highest dial numbers are relative to the median, not a claim that five stations own a third of listening. Summing dial positions is not the same as summing audiences. Pareto-on-frequency is a reminder that spectrum physics and market share are separate metrics. WHAT THIS FILE CANNOT TELL YOU Community-cleaned TidyTuesday snapshots are not live APIs. Missing values, spelling variants, and license-status quirks apply. Frequency is not listenership, and format labels can be stale or contested. Findings describe structural signals about U.S. radio station metadata — not a ratings analysis, and not a complete history of every translator and HD multicast. WHAT TO TAKE AWAY The U.S. radio dial in this file centers at 101 MHz with AM extremes near 1,700 kHz, Country as the most common format, and News/Talk pulled high by AM band placement. The citable split is spectrum versus culture: call-sign frequency leaders and format share leaders answer different questions about the same airwaves. DATA, METHODS & SOURCES