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Back about 25 years ago, I was working the night shift at the old WDGY-1130 in Minneapolis...50KW days and 25KW nights...with an EXTREMELY tight night pattern beamed a little east of north. So tight, you could be driving in to the city from the south, see the lights on the 9 tower array, and barely hear the station. Well, one day I pull a packet from my mailbox covered with strange foreign stamps. Inside was a note, and a cassette from a DXer in Finland! On the tape was 10-15 minutes of my show!! There was some fading evident, but the signal was damn good. Needless to say the fellow got a QSL card, a bumper sticker and a coffee mug for his efforts! Even at 25KW, antenna gain in the main lobe gave an effective power of approximately 530KW...more than enough to make it over the pole. In fact, the station's Chief Engineer claimed the Russians had operated a jammer on 1130 during the height of the Cold War in the early 60's...evidently that decadent Western rock n roll was coming in like a local!
And, like other posters have mentioned, the mushrooming of stations operating at night on clear channels (even at ridiculously low power levels) has taken a lot of fun out of AM DXing. There's still some catches out there, though. Nearly every night in the dead of winter I could pick up a station on 530 from, I think, the island of Anguilla in the Carribean. 50KW on a relatively unpopulated frequency seems to work well. Same holds true for the expanded AM band from 1610 to 1710 khz...relatively unpopulated, and with slightly better propagation afforded by the higher MW frequency. Years ago, when the skip zones were aligned right, PJB, Trans World Radio 800kHz from Bonaire in the Netherlands Antilles was an easy catch in North America. An honest 500Kw helped do the trick, too. And, if the skip zones WEREN'T aligned right, XRock 80 out of Juarez at 150Kw occupied the frequency.
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