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Originally Posted by stereofisher
The oldies station in Buffalo WKRW?? at 1520 is fun too. Running my Zenith Inneroceanic tonight instead of my big system.
Eric
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The Buffalo station is WKBW 1520. WKRW is the callsign of a translator station for NPR station WKSU near Akron, Ohio.
I have heard the Toronto big band station on 740 (it comes in here all the time on my '731 but not on a small replica cathedral in my bedroom [but the cathedral set does get CFCO 630 in Kent County, Ontario--go figure] or my $10 clock radio...oh well).
At least in Canada the AM dial still has some music stations in large cities, though some are going to talk, just as they are in this country. Case in point: CKLW in Windsor, Ontario dropped its music format some time ago (remember those wonderful days of "The Big Eight" in the '60s and '70s?) and is now a news/talk station targeting Windsor, ON and Detroit, Michigan (although the station has a very strong signal all along the south shore of Lake Erie from Toledo, Ohio east to at least Buffalo, and of course in the Detroit area).
Those older Zeniths are great for AM DXing. I'm not familiar with the Interoceanic model, but I have a 1963 Zenith K731 that will bring in stations all across the AM dial at night using only its built-in loop antenna (they didn't call those sets "Long Distance" for nothing). This set is great for in-state AM "DXing" in the daytime as well; from where I live I can hear stations from Youngstown, Ohio (close to Pittsburgh), Conneaut and Ashtabula, Ohio (50+ miles from Cleveland, on Lake Erie), Buffalo, New York, et al. and many Canadian stations. My 1980 Zenith H480W clock radio doesn't do half as well in the daytime, and a $10 clock radio on my nightstand in the bedroom is lucky if it gets the stronger Cleveland stations during the day (it gets the 50kW ones, but as for the smaller 5kW and weaker stations, forget it). In fact, most of my AM radios, including the AM tuner in my stereo system, will receive the local station 5 miles away (on 1460 kHz) on that frequency and also at 560 kHz--900 KHz down the dial! This happens all the time, not just in the daytime when the station runs 1 kW (it cuts its power in half at night to 0.5kW, probably with directional antenna, but the problem is still there even at the reduced power level; this is probably because I am so close to the transmitter).
I have many CDs with the music CKLW played during its heyday as "The Big Eight"; when I listen to them (I have one on now) it reminds me of those days when every major city in this country and Canada had at least one powerhouse top-40 station. I used to live in a suburb of Cleveland, where there were all sorts of top-40 rock stations on the AM dial when I was growing up in the '60s and '70s: CKLW from Windsor, WKYC-AM (1100, 50kW), WGAR-AM (1220, 50kW), WIXY (1260, 10kW day/0.5kW night now, but just 5kW days/nights thirty-five years ago), WELW (1330, 0.5kW, daytime only in '60s-'70s), WHK (1420, 5kW). That's all changed now, though; all those stations are talk these days, except for 1260 (now WWMK, Radio Disney).
The only oldies station in Cleveland these days (since 1981, anyhow) is on FM: WMJI, "Majic" 105.7. Liking oldies as I do, I keep my stereo on that station when I'm not listening to oldies or easy listening on Live365 on the Internet.
Wow. How times have changed. Thank goodness for music services such as BMG in Indy and others where one can still get oldies CDs, not to mention Internet radio and cable music channels. These services are helping to keep the oldies from sliding forever into oblivion, as more and more oldies AMs are abandoning the format for talk, sports, etc. (as WCKY in Cincinnati did at the beginning of this year).