Quote:
Originally Posted by John James
1968, 1969 etc., in my '66 Mustang, I used to get Fort Wayne, In. (don't know the call sign) down in Myrtle Beach, S.C. It was a good rock station then. We thought it was "cool" to hear something from so far away. To top it off, we were from Charlotte, so it was "outa site"!
(It may have been WOWO)  |
It wouldn't surprise me if it was WOWO 1190, Westinghouse Broadcasting's 50kW rock station in Fort Wayne -- that city's only 50kW AM station. Until about twenty-five years ago, that station was clear-channel 50kw covering 38 states, so it could very easily reach your area at night, the reason being that, until the FCC did away with clear channel AM in the mid-1980s, a 50kW station on any of the so-called "clear" AM broadcast channels--660, 670, 700, 800, 880, 890, etc.--had the frequency all to itself all night long, as any daytime stations on the frequency had to sign off after local sunset. The powerhouse signals of stations such as WNBC (now WFAN) 660 New York, WMAQ (now WSCR) 670 Chicago, 700 WLW Cincinnati, 800 CKLW Windsor/Detroit, WKYC 1100 Cleveland (now WTAM), et al. were heard after dark just about anywhere in the US in those days, except on the coasts, where the "other" 50kW station was located (in the days of clear channels, only two 50kW stations normally operated on the frequencies after dark; they were located on the east and west coasts of the US, or close to them). Today, even a 50kW station must use directional antenna patterns and/or reduce its power output so as to limit its coverage to no more than 750 miles; this has taken almost all the fun and mystery out of AM DXing unless you listen for stations on the so-called "graveyard" or local channels--those frequencies used by small local-service stations operating at 1kW or less. This type of DXing requires a lot of patience and concentration, as most of the time you will hear little more than a jumble of stations on these frequencies. Every once in a while, however, one signal will rise above the noise and will be heard, if only for a few seconds or minutes, and if you're lucky, that station will be a real piece of DX gold. I'll never forget one Sunday night about 20 years ago, when one of the local AM stations in Cleveland signed off for technical maintenance. Imagine my dumbfounded surprise when, a few minutes after the Cleveland station signed off, I heard news-talk station KOA in Denver, Colorado, booming in as well as if it were local! I was listening at the time with the AM tuner section of my Zenith integrated four-mode stereo system, using only its built-in ferrite loopstick AM antenna.
I never heard KOA again. The furthest AM DX I normally get here in northeastern Ohio at night is KMOX in St. Louis. I used to be able to hear WBAP in Dallas, but haven't heard from them in some time; maybe the antenna-pattern restrictions at night have something to do with it. Another station I hear quite often at night is WCCO 830 in Minneapolis, after a daytimer about 80 miles east of here on that frequency signs off for the night; then there's WHAS 840 in Louisville, Kentucky, WWL-AM 870 in New Orleans (the first time I ever heard that station was during Hurricane Katrina, when WWL was in emergency mode), WCBS 880 New York, WLS Talk Radio 890 in Chicago, WWJ 950 Detroit, WCFL 1000 Chicago, WBZ 1030 Boston, KYW 1060 Philadelphia ... and the list goes on. I have a Zenith C845 high-performance radio with an RF stage and two IF stages on both AM and FM, so I'll have to tune around on it some night and see what else I can snag. Even with the built-in Wavemagnet antenna (an outdoor wire is out of the question, as I live in an apartment building), some day I should be able to hear stations way out west, like Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, California ... if the conditions are ever right for that kind of DX reception from the eastern Great Lakes. I wonder how nowhereman1966 in the Pittsburgh area managed to snag a Los Angeles AM station on his car radio a few months ago (his post describing that is somewhere in this thread) using only a 31" car antenna, and if it ever happened again. The AM propagation conditions must have been just right that day or night, not unlike what the conditions must have been like the night I heard KOA in Denver.