That's a good question, but I think a lot of the answer is found in the various set-ups of verious radios. With the Superhet formula (antenna, r.f. amp, converter, i.f amp, detector, a.f amp then loudspeaker) signals are boosted to pretty sensitive levels. I'm not quite sure how it's done with solid state.

I remember reading back about 10 yrs or so ago that on a lot of the "primo" solid state communication receivers MW was deliberately de-sensitised.

Quality of AM tuners not what it used to be
 

The AM (MW) sections of most AM/FM receivers made in the last 30 years or so are not worth a hill of beans; that is, they may work well enough for local reception in close-in areas such as the near suburbs of major cities (or in the cities themselves), but any real distance from anything other than 50kW stations, forget it. Case in point: In the '80s, I had a Zenith four-mode integrated stereo system with an FM section which pulled in every major Cleveland station in stereo just fine, using just the line cord antenna (I lived about 15 miles closer to Cleveland at the time). The AM reception, however, left an awful lot to be desired. During daylight hours I could get most of the major Cleveland AMs, but at night all but the big 50kW stations were all but inaudible. On top of that, the AM section in my stereo was, IMHO, so poorly designed that I was hearing shortwave at certain points on the AM dial after dark. The AM tuner in my present stereo system (Aiwa 200-watt bookshelf system) isn't much better, and the FM tuner isn't much good either in this signal area some 30-40 miles southwest of the Cleveland FMs (I have a powered indoor "tower" antenna hooked up to it). I live about five miles from a 1kW (0.5kW or 500 watts nights) AM station that will appear at two points on the dial on my system's tuner, 0.9 MHz or 900 kHz apart--560 and 1460 kHz, the latter being the station's fundamental (assigned) frequency. Doesn't bother me, especially (or at all), as I don't listen to AM that much anyhow.

i dont know if this has been brought up yet(too lazy to look) but if you want to dx the am broadcast band and dont have a decent am tuner or antenna i suggest using your car radio:yes: they're usally made to better specs (for cancelling out noise anyways)give it a shot especailly after sunset and report back here pronto :D

. Case in point: In the '80s, I had a Zenith four-mode integrated stereo system with an FM section which pulled in every major Cleveland station in stereo just fine, using just the line cord antenna (I lived about 15 miles closer to Cleveland at the time). The AM reception, however, left an awful lot to be desired. During daylight hours I could get most of the major Cleveland AMs, but at night all but the big 50kW stations were all but inaudible. On top of that, the AM section in my stereo was, IMHO, so poorly designed that I was hearing shortwave at certain points on the AM dial after dark.


sounds like a all to common problem.most mfg of tuners that included am rarely paid attention to that band.there is a few like the philips ah673 that with a good signal can actually provide something worth listening to.my tu9900 is not too bad either for am but when push comes to shove i haul out my tube communication receivers that seem to pull the signals out of the mud when i want to do some serious dx'ing.
what your experiencing is imaging and is a indactor or the receiver to reject them.

What older tube radios are considered exceptionally good for AM dx'ing? I've been listening to more AM lately, and been considering looking around for a few more radios.

For the past week or so I've been listening to a 1935 Truetone wooden table radio here at my desk, been using it for several hours a night and it's still going strong with all original tubes and caps.

I can hook my McKay Dymek DA-5 ferrite bar antenna to my GE Super one (or two) and haul in a station every 10 khz on the mw band just about any evening.
Keep thinking that I'll try it (the DA-5) on my 2000X (now that I think about it, don't think I've ever had it on am) but never got around to it. I have tried it on several boat anchors but it seems right at home on the GE's

I hooked up my KIWA MW Loop to a friend's 1930s tombstone, & it was like the radio came alive-it was Sunday afternoon, & we were picking up one-lunger daytimers out of Kentucky from our NE Tenn. location.

Furthest ever for me was on FM , with a 1972-3ish Marantz 2270 at a buddie's home. He had a large rooftop antenna he used for vhf tv and fm, no splitters until further down the line near the receiver. He also used a rotator. We were listening to some rock on ~ 89 MHZ and I was playing around with the rotator.

All of a sudden, I got Strong skip on that station-- and we were astonished to hear Saskatchewan, CANADA - an alternative station , appearantly low-power FM, too! From the extreme south of New york, that was an impressive distance without even trying. Very strong and clear reception also.

Being located in extreme southern Alabama, I can hear WSB-750 Atlanta very clear at night. I like listening to Krok Talk with Chris Krok starting at 9PM central time. I can also hear WSM-650 Nashville, WBBM-Chicago and sometimes WWL in New Orleans on my Zenith C835. This radio has opened up the AM band to me again...and I am enjoying it! Amazing how this radio picks up so much better than the junk being made today.

On the FM side, the station I work for (103.7) comes in okay...but at 103.5 there is a station I cannot normally pickup that comes blowin' in during the morning hours and right around 104.1 is another I don't normally hear. They carry Braves baseball and, I think, preaching. I can hear a preacher screaming and some heavy gospel on there at different times.

Just amazing what this radio can hear...all with the built-in antenna.

That reminds me-I REALLY need to get my "good" antenna back up- a limb fell out of a tree I had one end of it hooked to, & took out about 50' or so. I'm "makin' do" w/only 20' or so of outside antenna-Basically the lead in from the section that got K.O.-ed. May hold off, this IS the thunderstorm season, we've been pretty good in having about one every other night or so.

The farthest I've ever been able to receive an AM radio signal is from Colorado on my 1956 Crosley AM Radio.

I can receive it here! WLS easily too.

That was very probably 770 KOB. Albuquerque (at least as far as I know; I've been away from NM for 11 years now) only has one 50KW station. I used to tune them in with local like strength in the early 70s on a no-name multiband SS receiver I carried with me on family vacations in Mexico - a good 800+ miles from the transmitter site. Later (1990 or so) while on graveyard duty at that very same station, I got a (satellite) telephone call from a guy who turned out to be the radio operator on a luxury yacht listening to KOB while sailing on the South China Sea!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
My most distant catch on AM with no external antenna was on one of those POS AM/FM turntable/cassette all in one units I had as a kid (about 1975). I was in Albuquerque at the time. I don't recall the call letters but I DO recall the station ID saying Regina Saskatchewan Canada. It was during the Christmas break at about 2AM with the weather outside being overcast and about 10 below zero F. The signal was extremely faint but acceptably free of atmospheric noise and interference from closer stations. I looked for them the next night and I couldn't find them again. Ahh... the caprices of the ionosphere!


Back in 1987, I was working for a news-talk station (1580 KZIA; now off the air). One morning while preparing to leave (I did graveyards), the secretary handed me a package with a lot of foreign stamps on it. She said, "I don't know who else to give this to; This is from Finland." Rather puzzled, I took the package to the production room and opened the package. In it, I found a tape, a reception report, and a rather plaintive letter from a Finnish DXer who had attempted to get a verification from the station for several years(!). The cassette he sent was faint but clear and contained one of the drop-ins we used as a program rejoiner which said "The Power of Information... K Z I A Albuquerque!". I didn't have to do the time conversion between where he was and where we were to know that we only used that particular drop-in during the night time hours in Albuquerque...hours when KZIA's transmitter power was reduced from 10KW to FORTY-SEVEN watts!

I hand-made a QSL for the poor fellow and made it a point to note that his catch was on a station operating at near QRP levels (at least for MW) and he had a great deal to brag about to his buddies in his local DX club.

about 20 years ago as a kid i picked up some antarctic scientific station on short wave while knob twiddling. i was using a blaupunkt barcelona chassis mounted inside a telefunken cabinet i found at my dads auto wrecking yard. antenna was a peice of wire about 6 feet long hanging out of the radio. im in miami fl so that was a good haul!

I heard my old hometown AM Station WGIR (Manchester NH) while sitting in my Dad'd pickup in Mcveytown PA It's only about 450 miles, but I thought it was just the coolest thing ever

I picked up a Warner-Robbins, Georgia FM station once, sitting outside of a burger place in Surgoinsville, Tennessee, on a 1980 Olds Cutlass factory AM/FM set. It was on a Saturday in the fall, it was cool, & I think they were getting ready for a football game...

Calgeri Canada from Roseville,Ca. just east of Sacramento on AM.
Suangean ATS 818 with a long wire ant.

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) :music::music:

From 1997 to 1999 I lived in Fargo, No. Dak. & Moorhead, Minn. Inside of my apartment, 10 feet from a window with no external antenna, I would occasionally pick up WWL back home in New Orleans faintly before dawn, usually in & out for 30-45 minutes. This was on a mid-60's GE AM-FM portable.

I sent off for a QSL card in 1998 - two years later I received it, it had been forwarded twice (from Moorhead, Minn. to Fargo and then to New Orleans.) I'll have to find that card one day.

I did drive from Fargo to New Orleans one weekend listening to KMOX St. Louis the entire way down.

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.

Furthest for me was picking up AM 1140 WRVA out of Richmond, Virginia. I also get one from Texas once in a while but I forgot the call letters and numbers. I get these on my 1963 Admiral clock radio by my bed, been good to me for 11 years now. Only changed 2 tubes so far. One when I got it and one recently. I also can pick em up on my Zenith radios. Not so much on my transistor ones, just the '63 Sony in the bathroom.

I know it's not vintage, but my little Degen (Kaito to you!) 1103 regularly gets G and EI (Ireland) amateurs on the 80m band during the gray line. This is just using the whip antenna. Good little radio, hears the NY aero weather every evening on 6604kHz (that's evening here, say midnight in LA!)

I can barely get local stations. The hill I live on blocks most of them out =(

Back in the '70's, in northeast NJ, I once picked up a Jesuscaster from Iowa, somewhere near 1500KHz. Very rare to hear a "K" station deep here in "W" land. :D Though "C" (Canadian) stations are fairly easy.

Was listening to this station tonight from the Metro South Boston suburbs. They had a dance party show and were playing a good variety. Cool to be listening to a station so far away.

"Duluth? Why you can get Terra del Fuego!" We moved to VT in 1958 and used to listen to WOR out of NYC. The amazing part was that it was Jean Shepard that we listened to. Wish I could do that now.
Mike

Nolan Woodbury said:
A superhet is a superhet - it doesn't matter whether it's hollow state or solid state! A single tube has possibly more gain than a single transistor, hence common mantle radios for local stations may have only needed 4 tubes in the radio circuit, where most SS radios had 6 transistors of which 3 were in the audio stages! Now that we have radios with hundreds of transistors in only three or four integrated circuits, it's possible to build digital display phase locked all-frequency super-sensitive radios for less cost than ever before.

Mind you, I would still like to see a shoot-out between a R390A against a WJ HF1000 on sheer performance, not the bells and whistles.

Best wishes for 2009 to everybody.

An old car radio running off a 12v battery or a converter can be a great AM DX rig, since they were optimized to work with that car whip antenna. Hook up any kind of longwire and the results can be impressive. Of course, tubes are a fun way to go...just have to block out the vibrator buzz!!

Just came in from the car...4:15 CST. 700 WLW, Cincinnatti, WSCR, WGN & WBBM Chicago all booming in...with the sun still up in W. Central MN! No WLS...co-channel in NDak with a big signal hasn't cut power yet. I love AM in the winter!

This makes me think back to a day in 07 when there was IMPRESSIVE skip happening the whole day. The skip was so bad that local stations were being blown off of the FM band like crazy. Not sure if it was or not, but I think I had a Miami, FL station on 100.7 FM up near Hardy, AR that day, that hung with me the entire way back to my home, on a cheap durabrand car stereo no less! Another night, I had DTV skip, receiving WLMT-DT, WPTY-DT from Memphis, TN. No digital from WMC at the time sadly, or WREG.

Aren't most of the tube-type car radios in existence of the 'low plate
potential' type, with a big PNP germanium output transistor? I know that
these came up only around 1957, but I haven't seen a vibrator type
car radio in years.

Thumb through this forum for my post on Battery Vibrators. I have my AM car radio pictured there, which is 100% tube. (6BE6, 6BA6, 6AV6, 6AQ5, 6X4 (6CS6 in place of 6BE6).

I remember when I listened to the Chuck Harder Show on WASP (1130 kc) here in Pittsburgh, sometimes in the winter, a New York City station, WBBR I think, would come in about 3:30 PM in the day and "walk over" WASP.

Tuesday night I managed to pick up KFYR in Bismarck, No. Dak. for about 30 seconds. Normally KTSA San Antonio is somewhat listenable - when it fades out a Mexican station can be heard. Guess KTSA and the mexican station both faded out at the same time, allowing me to barely hear a local commercial, station ID and rejoin for the Art Bell Program.

Bismarck is over 1500 miles from New Orleans as the crow flies. Wonder if they'll send me a QSL card if I write (haven't done that in years!)

Sure! Drop 'em a note and ask for a QSL. KFYR is quite the station...5kW with a 5/8 wave self-supporting tower (old school, for sure). Sitting on 550 in that rich Missouri River valley soil at Bismarck gives them one of the largest groundwave coverage areas in the US. Skywave ain't no slouch, either.

Here's a couple of not-trying-too-hard catches I've made in the last couple of days.
The RX is my Hammarlund HQ 145X and the antenna system is a pair of longwire antenna end fed to the leadin. One wire is 100 ft running E-W and the other running N-S. My location is NW Florida about 40 miles N of Pensacola at about 31 deg N 87 deg W:
WXM 650 Nashville
WBBM 780 Chicago
WJR 760 Detroit
WLOR 1550 Huntsville AL.
WPHT 1210 Philly, PA
These were all grey period listening sessions.

Question: Do any stations still do on-air transmitter checks? You know, with the tone sweeps and such like they used to do back in the "good old days"?

I once tuned in a 500W daytime only station in Falfurrias TX (don't recall the call or dial position) at about 3am MST from my Albuquerque NM location while they were doing their tests.

I can't remember the frequency, but I picked up an Atlanta AM station in my car in the St. Louis area back in high school. Braves game, Atlanta ads. I can't remember anything further than that.

Now if we want to talk about shortwave...my Euro-spec Philips pocket radio is a champ. :D