[Jeffhs]

One Sunday morning about 25 years or so ago, when I lived in a suburb of Cleveland, I heard KOA-AM, 850 kHz, from Denver, on my Zenith Allegro stereo system. Cleveland has a station on 850, but it was off the air for technical maintenance at the time. Haven't heard the Colorado station, or anything much west of Chicago except WBAP 820 in Dallas, Texas, since then. I usually hear stations in New York, Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, Richmond, Virginia and Pittsburgh, not to mention WLW in Cincinnati, several smaller Ohio stations, New York City, Buffalo and Schenectady (WGY Schenectady booms in here at night), and several 50kW Canadian stations, such as AM 740 in Toronto and CKLW in Windsor, after dark from my present location. I guess it's because Ohio is the easternmost state of the Midwest that I cannot hear most of the region's other big stations (I have yet to hear any stations from Missouri except St. Louis, the Dakotas, Illinois except Chicago, Indiana except Fort Wayne, etc). The Southwest? From here, no. I have yet to hear stations from Wyoming, Utah, Arizona and so on (even the big 50kW giants), although I don't use anything fancy for an antenna on my radios either (just the built-in ones); living in an apartment building means putting up a long wire antenna is out of the question. Another reason I don't hear most of the Midwest's/Southwest's 50kW AMs may be that, after the FCC did away with clear channels about 20 years ago, all the smaller stations on those frequencies (most of them licensed for daytime-only operation), not to mention the big stations now having to restrict their night antenna patterns and/or reduce their power output from 50kW to 10kW or less, now means most if not all of those big former 50kW "giants" aren't so "big" anymore. Cincinnati's WLW, for example, calls itself "The Big One", but since 700 kHz is no longer a clear channel, I doubt if that slogan means much anymore. Oh well; I'm sure many of those 50kW former clear-channel bruisers are now saying "it was fun while it lasted."