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Old 06-22-2016, 05:24 PM
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Best/Strangest DX catches

From another thread:

"Originally Posted by Sandy G
So.... In other words, DON'T go looking to snare Radio Nibi-Nibi at high noon in N. America.. That's somethin' we oughta start here- A list of your weirdest, most unusual DX catches over the years. MW, FM, SW, whatever, & what you picked it up on.. And TRY not to "Lie" too much about it."

Ok, I will open with radio Farda on 1575 kHz Dec 12, 2009 7 pm and later from the US west coast. I did not hear a clear id that I could understand, just a man singing in an unfamiliar language in a very strange musical scale, but several other west coast dxers made a positive id.
Icom 8500/100 ft "longwire" antenna.

Any other LW SW MW FM catches?

jr
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Old 06-22-2016, 08:53 PM
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A couple of times back in last winter, I had my 2 pre-war Arvin tube out, & picked up WLAC in Nashville w/it.. L'il feller TRIES harder..
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Old 06-22-2016, 09:01 PM
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Has there been any LW broadcasts recievable in the USA in the last 15 years?....All I can ever recall tuning on that band is atmospheric noise.

In Ill. I had some old tube SW radios (mostly AA5 and euro HiFi) and heard some stuff, but I was too young to remember what....Aside from getting a Texas station regularly, late at night waiting for local AM 780 to play it's midnight old time radio programs.

In Florida I got my first quality SW rig (ICF-SW7600GR) and I logged a whole bunch of shortwave stations CRI, Japan's english service, the BBC, enough Spanish speaking stations to get an idea what it must be like to use a radio well south of the border , an odd ball station out of Maine (the Planet IIRC), radio cuba (that is far from DX there), and a number of other stations. I was glued to that little set over most meals at restaurants, at home and sometimes on my bike....I used to go out late, away from homes for less noise, and come home to clip it to my long wire to get weak stations. Before the Sony There was one US station that played old time radio late at night that I would tune on a red Hallicrafters trans-Oceanic clone on it's original caps...I set it up with a cassette recorder on a timer to record it. I've eavesdropped a good number of Ham conversations too. Some of them were as far off as Ill. On AM I was able to get Ny. and Tn. I also was able to tune AM 780 out of Chicago at night once (comes in better up around Ga.). TV wise there was one great time, I had bought this white space age looking Sears SS table set...It was a hot DX set and conditions were good I got Tx., Tn. and some others UHF only had 1-2 blanks at most between channels with signal, and VHF was fairly packed too....I'll never forget that.

Those are the more interesting ones.
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Old 06-22-2016, 10:07 PM
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"Has there been any LW broadcasts recievable in the USA in the last 15 years?....All I can ever recall tuning on that band is atmospheric noise."

Yes! Winter of 2009 (from the west coast) was also hot for long wave reception from Russia. Many nights that winter, using the same radio and antenna, Radio Rossii was clearly heard on 279, 180 and 153 kHz! Some evenings 279 was strong enough to be heard on a Sony 2010, using just the built-in antenna. RR 279 transmits from Yuzhno-Sakhalinsko with 500 kw!

jr

sad edit add... looks as if Jan. 2014 was about the end of Russian LW broadcasting:

http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-news-f...where-25683656

.

Last edited by jr_tech; 06-22-2016 at 10:34 PM. Reason: add sad news
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Old 06-23-2016, 09:42 AM
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Years ago I had a Kenwood R-5000, & one night I was listening in the ham bands, & it MUST have been "Idiot Night", because there were all manner of silly stuff on there. One guy was playing over & over, "Phone Phreaking is a Federal Offense".. A Federal Offense.. a Federal offense, & they were all belching & pharting, carrying on like kids' One time, on Christmas night, they called an FCC "Monitoring station" & wished them a Merry Christmas.. I think they were on 3868, or 3898.
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Old 06-23-2016, 03:08 PM
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G'day all, for me two incidents. One was hearing a Russian/CIS station for a few minutes on the LW band from here in Northern Australia over a couple of evenings some years ago, and secondly some 'S' bursts from the Planet Jupiter at around 22 MHz. Regards, Felix vk4fuq.
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Old 06-24-2016, 05:27 PM
MRX37 MRX37 is offline
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Not radio, but a TV station. Many years ago, long before the digital switchover, I had the fortune to pull in WOIO Channel 19 from Cleveland.

I'm near Detroit.

So on that one day, WOIO managed to make it all the way across lake Erie, through part of Canada, and to my rooftop antenna in Detroit where the picture was fuzzy, but strong enough for color. IIRC the WOIO logo was yellow at the time.
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Old 06-25-2016, 05:31 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Sandy G View Post
Years ago I had a Kenwood R-5000, & one night I was listening in the ham bands, & it MUST have been "Idiot Night", because there were all manner of silly stuff on there. One guy was playing over & over, "Phone Phreaking is a Federal Offense".. A Federal Offense.. a Federal offense, & they were all belching & pharting, carrying on like kids' One time, on Christmas night, they called an FCC "Monitoring station" & wished them a Merry Christmas.. I think they were on 3868, or 3898.
The other night, while working on my old Panasonic RF-2200, I stumbled across a pile up of idiots on 75 meters (3840, IIRC). Now the 2200 is not the best radio for tuning ssb, but I thought that it was seriously broken, as I could barely tune in anything out of what was confirmed by my Icom 8500 as pile of hams jamming, belching, farting, swearing, playing music using several different modes of modulation...what a mess! Same stuff was still going on the following evening, so I'm guessing that it is a more or less permanent *feature* of the band.

jr
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Old 06-25-2016, 05:45 PM
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Years ago I was listening to AM on my Sony portable late night in bed and picked up a station in Montana. I listened to them for several hours.
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Old 06-26-2016, 10:49 AM
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Just the other day I picked up WNMU 90.1 FM from Marquette, Michigan, in the Detroit area for a solid five or six minutes before it faded away. It was surprisingly clear; there must have been some crazy tropo-ducting...
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Old 06-26-2016, 12:52 PM
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Nice long haul tropo...with perhaps a little lake assistance.

https://bit.ly/28VvAZ2

High power and good antenna height helps a bit also:

https://transition.fcc.gov/fcc-bin/f...2=&EW=W&size=9

This west coast nerd was a bit surprised to see that that northern location was a part of Michigan. May I ask what radio/tuner you used?

jr
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Old 06-26-2016, 02:48 PM
Titan1a Titan1a is offline
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I once had a contact with a Wichita, KS FM station from Omaha, NE.
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Old 06-27-2016, 08:50 AM
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A Scott Metropolitan 16A with roof mounted FM antenna of my own design (essentially a narrow bandwidth Gray Hoverman, optimized with 4NEC2).
A lot of folks seem to forget that the Great Lakes state consists of two penninsulas, myself included on occasion.
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Old 06-27-2016, 03:15 PM
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Years ago when I had a police scanner...our police department and one up in Michigan were clearly getting each others station and patrol car calls!
It lasted for nearly a week and then went away as suddenly as it had started...
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Old 06-28-2016, 05:15 PM
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KMOX from St Louis. The Rockies were playing the Cardinals, and I wanted to see if I could listen to the cardinals radio broadcast. Sure enough I was able to pull it in.

KNX from Los Angeles. I remember they did a traffic update which I thought was pretty funny: "The 405 is a mess, and stay off 101 at all costs." That was it. Being an LA traffic reporter must be one of the most depressing jobs in America.

Receiving these stations is probably not that surprising since their both clear channel stations. But both stations were heard with a crappy 2002 "Lennox Sound" am/fm/cd/cassette boom box with just whatever internal antenna it has.

Now here's one hopefully someone can explain... As a kid, I had a pair of cheap 22-channel walkietalkies my grandparents gave me for my birthday. One day when I was around 7 years old, I got the grand idea of turning on my radio (same one as mentioned above) and leaving one walkietalkie next to it with the talk button held down using a rubber band so I would hearing the radio through my other walkietalkie. I took the second walkietalkie outside and accidentally dropped it on the lawn. When I picked it up, it was on the wrong channel. Must have hit the button when it fell. So I went back to the correct channel and much to my surprise, i heard the opening theme to one of the cartoons I watched back then. I went inside and turned on the tv, and sure enough, that show was on and the walkietalkie was in sync with it. It was on a pbs station I think. So I went upstairs and the radio and other walkietalkie were working just fine. I've never been able to figure out why that walkietalkie played audio from a tv channel for a few seconds, and it never happened again. Analog tv was definitely on the air at this time, walkietalkie must have glitched and picked up the broadcast for a few seconds.
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