[Jeffhs]

Originally Posted by radiodayz

The AM and FM dials are pretty full here in Seattle, with nighttime AM DX stations regularly heard from as far south as KNX in LA on 1070 and as far east as the CBC on 540 in Saskatchewan (can't remember the callsign at the moment).

I'm mainly an AM listener but recently decided to give the commercial FM stations a listen. I couldn't believe how many commercials they carry now! I mean, in an hour they probably play 35 minutes of music and 25 of commercials. I don't remember it being like this 20 or even 10 years ago. Guess they're trying to make up the lost ad revenue (i.e. lower rates) by having more advertisers.

AM is probably just as bad, but somehow it's less jarring to hear talk constantly interrupted than music.

Seattle is only about 150 miles from Vancouver, British Columbia; you should be able to hear AM stations from the latter city quite well most of the time (I found out the location of Vancouver while watching the Olympics earlier this year).

You are correct as to the insane amount of commercials on AM and FM radio stations nowadays. It is the same in every major city in the US, no exceptions. I don't listen to radio (AM or FM) much anymore for just that reason, listening instead to Internet radio and my own music collection, a good part of which is on my computer's hard drive; I access it through Nullsoft's Winamp media player and have my computer's sound card connected to my stereo system. The sound quality, IMHO, is excellent.

Talk radio is the reason I gave up on AM, except occasionally for DXing. I am old enough (almost 54) to remember AM music radio (I grew up listening to every rock and roll radio station in Cleveland, not to mention powerhouses of the time the likes of 66WNBC in New York, 89WLS in Chicago [now playing oldies in streaming audio at trueoldies947.com], "The Big Eight" CKLW-AM in Windsor, Ontario, "Big Ten" WCFL 1000 in Chicago, et al.) The oldies (now called "classic hits") in most major cities are now on FM--on 105.7 in Cleveland and also, where I live today (33 miles east of downtown and within a mile of the south shore of Lake Erie), on a station one county east of here on 102.5.

However, that's progress. I like oldies well enough, now being old enough to remember when those songs were top-40, that I bookmarked the websites of WLS-FM and also KOOL-FM 105 in Phoenix, Arizona. That's one great thing about the Internet -- many radio stations now stream their programming online, so one never has to be far away from his or her favorite music. The only thing I don't like about streaming audio is that, to listen to at least one of my favorite stations' streams (wouldn't you know it, the classic hits station in Cleveland) requires a media player I don't have and cannot use on my 10-year-old computer, running Windows 98se. Oh well. WLS-FM's streaming oldies and those from the Phoenix station, IMHO, more than make up for that.

BTW, from where you are in Seattle, I would think you would hear AM stations just about everywhere on the West Coast and the southwestern US as well. Even within your own state you should be able to hear stations from Spokane and other areas as well, unless the Seattle area is not conducive to DXing by virtue of mountains, hills, etc. California is especially bad in this regard; I read years ago in an old issue of the (now defunct) Popular Electronics magazine a letter to the editor from someone who had lived for decades in the Los Angeles area, and had never heard FM radio stations from any other state. I couldn't believe the L.A. area is that isolated from the rest of the West Coast (or the Western US, for that matter) as far as radio signals are concerned.

Some of my best DX catches on radio were, about 25 years ago, station KOA-850 in Denver, which I heard one early Monday morning when one of the Cleveland AM stations was off the air for maintenance, and WEAT-FM (yes, FM) in West Palm Beach, Florida, forty years ago. I was 14 years old at the time and was listening to a Cleveland FM station that summer afternoon, when the station suddenly went off the air. Imagine my surprise when, about a minute later, WEAT-FM came booming in, in stereo yet, just as clearly as if it were right next door.

On television, I have had several good DX catches, all before I had cable. The best one, I think, however, was WPBT-TV channel 2 in Miami. I lived in an eastern Cleveland suburb at the time, and one summer day about 33 years ago, I idly turned my TV dial to channel 2 and saw the Miami station, as clear as any of the locals in Cleveland. The weird part was that I continued to receive this station, with the same great picture quality, for the next five days in a row! I didn't have a fancy antenna, either--just a pair of rabbit ears atop the set.

I also had a surprise one afternoon, 30+ years ago, when I turned on the TV in my living room, put it on channel 2, and saw--to my dumbfounded surprise--a station ID from a television station in Cheyenne, Wyoming. The TV was hooked up to an antenna pointed at the Cleveland television transmitters, which are all southwest of the city; well, there must have been a wide-open path to the southwest well beyond Cleveland that day, as I was getting TV from Wyoming, Texas, Oklahoma, just about every station in the southwest on channel 2. I did get one Texas station from the Beaumont/Port Arthur, Area on channel 4 that summer as well, but no other spectacular DX on any other channel except for one day (very early morning) in the '70s, when I picked up channel 5 from Saginaw, Michigan, about a half-hour before channel 5 in Cleveland signed on. I also got Saginaw's channel 25 about an hour or so before the local PBS station began its schedule of broadcasting.