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  #16  
Old 05-26-2010, 04:43 PM
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VintagePC VintagePC is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Rodzilla View Post
i posted a thread about it when it happened here in Halifax...as you say we did pick up a few new fm stations,which for the most part are a bit more relevant,to me at least...and really other than enthusiast types dealing with antiques,pretty much anyone with a radio these days has FM capabilites.

AM going away here has really been a non issue..most people didn't even notice...just a little while ago,a GF of mine was telling me how the radio didnt seem to work in her classic car anymore,she insisted that it used too but that it must have broken somehow...she doesn't drive the car regularly and didn't realize that there was just nothing for it to pick up anymore...!
Ooohhh... a fellow Haligonian
The only reason I know and posted here is because I was looking to see what I could listen to on the AM-only tube set I'm restoring (Fleetwood 4068 thread here)
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  #17  
Old 05-26-2010, 05:07 PM
sprman55 sprman55 is offline
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Hi could it be propogation affecting what you are hearing..Here AM is loaded up day and night..I hear stuff from Canada too here at night. How many stations are we talking about..Could be they all belong to the same network or owner?Just a guess on my part. Sprman55 : )
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  #18  
Old 05-26-2010, 05:22 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Hemingray View Post
Does this mean the entire AM band in NS is fair game now? Not much that I can get here where I am, but at night it's real good.
What do you hear on AM radio, as a rule, in your town? Just curious.

I thought your area gets most Jonesboro, Arkansas AM stations full time. I just looked at the profile for your town on CityData.com, and found that you are but a short distance from Jonesboro. Evening Shade is not that far from Memphis either (if you consider 100+ miles "not far"). I'd think you could hear both cities' major 50kW AM stations in daytime and until/unless they change their signal patterns after sundown. Fifty-kW full-time stations had literally coast-to-coast range at night (when daytimers on the former clear channels had to sign off at local sunset, leaving the clears quiet at night, and all night except for, at most, two 50kW stations, one on either coast) before the FCC did away with the clear channels and granted daytimers the option of running at limited nighttime power (from five to a maximum of 500 watts), often with directional antennas, about 25 years ago; however, since you are just over 100 miles from Memphis, I'd think you would hear their 50kW stations in spite of the FCC ruling that now limits former clear-channel stations' coverage to 750 miles in all directions.
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  #19  
Old 05-26-2010, 05:36 PM
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i haven't tried extensively to see what i could get...i did get something faint out of new england tuning manually around one night in the car,[auto search just goes round and round the dial endlessly]that was right around the time they announced the last local station was signing off so i was checking...whatever i got was religious programming,so i didn't listen long enough to see where it was originating from,Maine tho i think...

my restored Nordmende carmen gets nothing on AM[shortwave gets a few things],but it lacks an external antenna,and the internal one is probably shielded by the large internal foil FM antenna! when i briefly powered on my new Bendix project,it was on AM and it was getting "something" here and there..not anything really listenable but i was surprised that it was at least"seeing" faint signals...from "somewhere" during the late afternoon...

as for the girlfriends car...pushbutton presets...the stations around here were likely set ages ago and haven't moved,i doubt she tried to spin the dial manually when all the locals were absent...car is a 67 Pontiac Beaumont BTW...stored all winter and never frozen..i think there's only about 40k on it??!!
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  #20  
Old 05-26-2010, 09:35 PM
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Rules?

Quote:
Originally Posted by Jeffhs View Post
VK has very specific rules about political content in postings; anyone who goes counter to those rules will be warned that he is skating on thin ice, and if this doesn't stop the political grandstanding in its tracks immediately, the errant poster will be suspended and/or banned from ever posting to these forums again.
I would also suggest that you carefully read VK's forum rules, if you haven't already. They will go into detail as to what is and is not allowed in these forums; indeed, they need to be read and clearly understood beyond the shadow of even the most unreasonable doubt by every VK member before he or she makes his or her first post.
I must be missing something... A while back, I noticed that many posters on this forum will not use the term "eBay" or will use a disclaimer such as "I am not associated with this auction" when posting a link to an eBay auction... I went looking for a videokarma rule section, to find out what is permitted with respect to eBay links. I could not find any rules. I have always tried to use common sense in posting, and hope that I have not offended anyone, but if there are specific rules, please direct me to their location.
Thanks!
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  #21  
Old 05-26-2010, 09:45 PM
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As for a 1KW daytimer station going dark, I wondered how such stations could have ever survived even 40 years ago. As it is, the AM band is a little overcrowded and if a daytimer goes dark, it's less interference to stations in nearby markets in the same channel. AM tends to be large regions of interference with small islands of service.
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  #22  
Old 05-26-2010, 09:47 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by jr_tech View Post
I must be missing something... A while back, I noticed that many posters on this forum will not use the term "eBay" or will use a disclaimer such as "I am not associated with this auction" when posting a link to an eBay auction... I went looking for a videokarma rule section, to find out what is permitted with respect to eBay links. I could not find any rules. I have always tried to use common sense in posting, and hope that I have not offended anyone, but if there are specific rules, please direct me to their location.
Thanks!
jr
You didn't do or say anything wrong. My remarks were directed to VK member compucat, who had made several politically-charged remarks in his reply to this thread; in fact, VK member AUdubon5425 saw that reply and even made a statement that this thread could be closed if the political "crap" (his word) doesn't stop. I just looked at the thread a few minutes ago, however, and found that compucat has since deleted his post, so I think that's the end of the problem.
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  #23  
Old 05-26-2010, 10:44 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by wa2ise View Post
As for a 1KW daytimer station going dark, I wondered how such stations could have ever survived even 40 years ago. As it is, the AM band is a little overcrowded and if a daytimer goes dark, it's less interference to stations in nearby markets in the same channel. AM tends to be large regions of interference with small islands of service.
One of the problems with the 1kW daytime station I mentioned was that, in the last year or so before it signed off permanently, it was a sports station being programmed from a satellite feed--with little or no local programming. The other problem was that this station was trying (unsuccessfully) to compete against a 50kW sports station in Cleveland; the daytimer was in a very small town that received the 50kW station (and most other radio stations in the Cleveland radio market) very well, so it is likely that listeners in the small town were tuning in to the 50kW sports station a lot more than they were listening to the smaller local one. This always means trouble for radio stations because they depend on advertising revenue to stay on the air; this is especially true for small stations in one-horse towns. The small station in the Geauga County, Ohio town I mentioned in my post is no exception. They tried everything in their power to keep from going under--among the things they tried was an attempt to get FCC approval to move to 870 kHz, so they could install a more powerful transmitter. That failed miserably; I don't know for certain why, but I have a suspicion that, since 870 kHz is only 20 kHz (0.2 MHz) up the dial from a 50kW Cleveland station at 850 (the station the 1kW daytime Geauga County station was trying to compete against), there were concerns that the two stations could interfere with each other, or worse, the Cleveland station could obliterate the smaller one. Another problem, had the Cleveland sports station moved to 870 kHz, would have been nighttime interference to 50kW WWL-AM radio in New Orleans, also on 870, unless the Cleveland station employed a very sharply directional nighttime signal pattern and reduced its nighttime power to well below 5kW (the station runs, and has run since it increased power to 50kW a few years ago, 4700 watts nighttime on 850 kHz). Yet another problem, and why the 1kW daytime Ohio station finally threw in the towel when it signed off for the last time on Memorial Day about five years ago, was that by now the station was literally falling apart--antenna towers had been improperly anchored to the ground and could have toppled in the first good windstorm, an antiquated transmitter and studio equipment, and other problems the owner just couldn't deal with any longer. The AM station went silent shortly thereafter and the owner/licensee, Music Express Broadcasting, then decided to concentrate its efforts on maintaining and operating the other station it owns, WKKY-FM 104.7 in a small town on the shores of Lake Erie.

I think the US would be better off without AM radio, as most of the stations are talk, sports or religion--formats that could easily be moved either to the Internet (streaming audio) or to FM. The problem, however, with moving underperforming AM stations to FM, especially in smaller markets, is the sheer cost of operating another station (which many cities cannot afford, especially in today's economy, to say nothing of the fact that most major cities' FM stations are running, and have been running for years or in some cases decades, established formats already and would be unwilling to switch), unless the AM station moved its programming to an existing FM station that itself was underperforming so badly it was on the verge of collapse.

Streaming audio over the Internet looks, on paper anyway, like a viable alternative to over-the-air broadcasting, but it too is very expensive to maintain once the stream is established. Unless the station's owner is sure beyond the shadow of a doubt that enough people will listen to his/her station to keep the stream online for more than just a few weeks or months, exclusively streaming a radio station over the Internet at the expense of the station's over-the-air signal is a risk few if any stations can afford to take. A small local station near the Cleveland suburb in which I grew up does stream over the Internet, but it is a talk station whose owners probably are convinced will survive since people such as myself who cannot, by virtue of the station's 42-watt directional nighttime signal, hear the over the air broadcast can log on to the station's Internet site and listen to the station's programming there.
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Last edited by Jeffhs; 05-27-2010 at 12:42 PM.
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  #24  
Old 05-26-2010, 11:13 PM
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Hemingray Hemingray is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Jeffhs View Post
What do you hear on AM radio, as a rule, in your town? Just curious.

I thought your area gets most Jonesboro, Arkansas AM stations full time. I just looked at the profile for your town on CityData.com, and found that you are but a short distance from Jonesboro. Evening Shade is not that far from Memphis either (if you consider 100+ miles "not far"). I'd think you could hear both cities' major 50kW AM stations in daytime and until/unless they change their signal patterns after sundown. Fifty-kW full-time stations had literally coast-to-coast range at night (when daytimers on the former clear channels had to sign off at local sunset, leaving the clears quiet at night, and all night except for, at most, two 50kW stations, one on either coast) before the FCC did away with the clear channels and granted daytimers the option of running at limited nighttime power (from five to a maximum of 500 watts), often with directional antennas, about 25 years ago; however, since you are just over 100 miles from Memphis, I'd think you would hear their 50kW stations in spite of the FCC ruling that now limits former clear-channel stations' coverage to 750 miles in all directions.
Within my home, even with an outdoor antenna, I can only seem to pull in KRMG 740 from Tulsa, OK at night. I suspect it's one of the three running computers in this room, probably this one. I can take my little wooden Transitone outside and get a dial full
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  #25  
Old 05-27-2010, 01:00 AM
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Jeffhs, I'd hate to see AM go away!

When I travel, I prefer listening to AM and if it's nightime I'll dx depending on where I am, and I like to hear the weather and road conditions also.

There's also Trucker related shows on at night too..more people may listen to AM then you realize, and like I mentioned I live in a major market area.

It's bad enough that we have to feed our vintage TV's artificial signals but with the mobility of AM (and our vintage radios) we can still have AM!
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  #26  
Old 05-27-2010, 06:49 AM
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Reece Reece is offline
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No problems with AM in south central PA: lots of stations daytime and lots more at night, quite listenable. Daytime I hear locals and Harrisburg, Philly, Reading, Lancaster, York. Nightime all of these plus New York, Boston (WBZ is a blowtorch), etc. etc., all possible on an AA5 with its own loop. Gotta turn off the computer and be sure no light dimmer is on, though.
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  #27  
Old 05-27-2010, 08:15 AM
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There are many AM stations here, too many to move them all to FM. Although formats have changed, every occupied dial position has remained occupied as long as I can remember although a few stations have traded dial positions with others. AM reception here is usually good. DXing is great here too. I get a station from Canada, AM 740, called Zoomer Radio. They play oldies and vintage radio shows. I hope AM never goes away because many of my vintage radios would become obsolete.
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  #28  
Old 05-27-2010, 02:26 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Hemingray View Post
Within my home, even with an outdoor antenna, I can only seem to pull in KRMG 740 from Tulsa, OK at night. I suspect it's one of the three running computers in this room, probably this one. I can take my little wooden Transitone outside and get a dial full
Wow! What a great location for Dxing!
I just looked up the location on "Radio Locator" and found that you should be in range of something like 37 stations... but with mostly weak reception. More FMs than AMs within range. Great place for a R-390!
http://www.radio-locator.com/cgi-bin...&x=20&y=4&sid=
jr
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  #29  
Old 05-27-2010, 04:33 PM
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matt_s78mn matt_s78mn is offline
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I have a lot of comments related to the current state of commercial broadcasting that I'll save for a different thread, different time. However, I used to be an avid listener to AM. No matter where I was located, I'd find a radio and tune around until I found Art Bell. Then - I was a happy camper. He's been gone for a while now, replaced by George Noory, so I don't really listen to that show as often anymore. I don't really care for most of the syndicated talk shows, trucker shows, all-sports stations, religious broadcasters, etc. Really the only AM station I ever listen to anymore is WGN 720 from Chicago. They've got LIVE, LOCAL talk, great hosts, interesting topics (gotta love website wednesday night, lol) Generally if I want to listen to music on the radio, I don't even bother with AM. Its too noisy and low bandwidth so it generally sounds like crap, for me FM and HDradio are the way to go.
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  #30  
Old 05-27-2010, 05:26 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by jr_tech View Post
Wow! What a great location for Dxing!
I just looked up the location on "Radio Locator" and found that you should be in range of something like 37 stations... but with mostly weak reception. More FMs than AMs within range. Great place for a R-390!
http://www.radio-locator.com/cgi-bin...&x=20&y=4&sid=
jr
Well, haul 'er on over one night!
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