My first am DX list:
 

Folks, I was unable to sleep last night, so I crept downstairs, cranked up the old Zenith console, and started to tune in to After Dark with George Noory. I got halfway across the dial when I picked up an OTR broadcast of Gangbusters. That drew me in and I was shocked to hear that it was coming from CHML in Ontario! Wow! My little 8s463 with just the wavemagnet antenna can do all that? So I set to writing down all the call signs I could find as I scanned the dial. I am very pleased with the results. I have four other stations that I could hear clearly but they played interminable broadcasts of After Dark and ESPN sports with no call sign so they are out. All stations logged between 0145 to 0235 hrs EST. I am in Lancaster, PA.

550 WER Buffalo, NY
900 CHML Hamilton, Ontario
580 WHP Harrisburg, Pa
570 WMCA NY, NY
610 WIP Philadelphia, Pa
650 WSM Nashville, TN
700 WLW Cincinnati, OH
710 WOR NY, NY
720 WGN Chicago, IL
740 CFZM Toronto, Ontario
760 WJR Detroit, MI
800 CKLW Windsor, Ontario
830 WEEU Reading, PA
880 WCBS NY,NY
1000 WMVP Chicago, IL
1040 WHO Des Moines, IA
1060 KYW Philadelphia, PA
1120 KMOX St. Louis, MO
1040 WWBA Tampa, FL
1250 WEAE Pittsburgh, PA
1390 WLAN Lancaster, PA
1220 WHKW Cleveland, OH
1490 WLPA Lancaster, PA
1520 WWKB Buffalo, NY
1530 WCKY Cincinnati, OH

If anybody could tell me how WWBA got on the list, I'd like to hear it-the FCC lists this as 3.6 KW daytime! Almost all of the rest of these guys are 50KW monsters...

Great list of catches for a casual bandscan! I used to be way heavy into AMDXing in the 60s and 70s but all the stations I used to listen to on a regular basis all went to nighttime network programming (anyone recall the Overdrive Trucking Network?)
I still occasionally browse the MW band but its not the same as it used to be. The thing I enjoyed most about the MW band way back when was each station actually had live local programming from Little Rock AK or Denver CO or wherever (I grew up in Albuquerque, NM) and I could get the "feel" of the town each station was broadcasting from. Now, it's all syndicated talk shows for the most part.

EDIT I just looked up your Zenith rig. Nice console! Bet she does pretty well on SW, too.

Thanks Able! Below is a link to my zenith:

http://s288.photobucket.com/albums/l...ent=zenith.jpg

It looks a little different as I had to strip the whole cabinet-it must have been in a flood as the bottom half of the radio had very little veneer left on it. I spent a month building up the old layers of thin wood until it was level enough to apply new veneer. The most challenging refinish I have ever done. I did make up new photofinish strips to go around the top, but they looked terrible so I went with just doing the edges in a very dark finish. The rectifier was shorted when I found it, but luckily the power transformer was fine. I even restuffed the caps in this one.

Overdrive Trucking was music, right? I did listen in on the Midnight Trucking Radio network show out of Detroit, but that was more talk radio slop. The best station I found last night was out of Nashville, which was playing some music from the Grand Old Opry.

WOAH.. beautiful Zenith. I've got a 1939 that I would really like to get working.

You never mentioned in your thread as to where you are at. Did you restore this, or did you have it done by someone in your area or what?

Here's mine.. http://www.flickr.com/photos/dc-duo/...7601529063635/ I've done a lot of work on the wood, (mostly just cleaning and refreshing the lost moisture) and got it almost new looking (just restored, not refinished) and now all I need to do is get the radio working..

Yes... the OTN was country music aimed, not surprisingly, at truckers on the road. Hearing more and more stations sell out to the syndicated networks was the death knoll of the fun days of AMDXing.

And WOW! Beautiful refurb job there. I'd never have guessed that it had any water damage. Nice job.

Awrite !! It'll only get better til around March or so, when the thunderstorms start crankin' back up ! Moving the radio to the other side of the room, turning it 90 degrees, could easily bring up a whole 'nother list of stations on those same frequencies, as could listening at different times of the night.

I still play around on the AM band at night; but, not as much as I used to. I'm just so disgusted with the talk, talk, talk, talk, and more talk. I can still get music on WSM and WDIA. That's about it except for an occasional "music of your life" or "classic country" station that is full of noise and fades out within 3 minutes of finding it. I wish I was around during the '60's and early '70's when it was music, music, music, music, and more music!

Yeah. "AM" stands for "All Mumbling" because that's about all you hear these days. I used to drive my mom nuts when she'd come in to the room in the morning and find my earphone still crammed in my ear. I used to tune in to KSL Salt Lake City UT to listen to the CBS Radio Mystery Theater, then tune to KFAB Omaha for their "Serenade In The Night" show which was nothing but un-rock music like Perry Como, Frank Sinatra, Ferrante and Teicher, Henry Mancini etc. The mix was about 70% instrumental and was perfect for me to sleep to. If I woke up before 6am Mountain time, KFAB would be back to the daytime programming which always started with the farm reports (pork belly prices, cattle prices, farm supply commercials, etc.) I don't know what they did for regular daytime programming because as soon as the sun came up, KFAB disappeared till the next night. KOA in Denver was another music station on the graveyard shift as was KOMA. And who can forget the great XRock 80?
Sad. So sad. AM used to be a great place for such varied entertainment.

It's why I'd like to win the lotto because I'd start an AM station and run it like they USED to be run in the 60s and 70s.

I'm amazed you were hearing WHKW in Cleveland from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, which was formerly top-40 WGAR 1220 in the '60s-'70s--despite the fact that WHKW is a 50kW station. I just looked at the signal pattern for that station on Radio-Locator.com and found that even its "distant" signal pattern doesn't reach much beyond Pittsburgh. WHKW is directional (one pattern) 24/7 because of a Canadian station on 1220.

I also looked up station "CFZM" in Toronto on 740. Radio-Locator could not find a station with those calls. I think you may have meant CHWO 740 AM in Toronto, which is (or was) a big-band station until recently.

I am also surprised you are hearing stations from Florida in Lancaster. I live near Cleveland and have never once heard any Florida stations on AM at night, either where I live now or where I used to live; the former is a small town near Lake Erie, the latter is an eastern suburb of Cleveland. In fact, the only time I ever heard anything at all from Florida on any of my radios was back about 38 years ago, when a thunderstorm knocked one of the local stations off the air. It was during the summer of that year; there must have been a temperature inversion or something of that nature, as I was hearing a station from West Palm Beach, Florida on our local station's dial position (107.9 MHz), strong as any of the Cleveland stations and even in stereo (!), shortly after the local station went silent. Amazing, as I was listening at the time on a 17-transistor AM/FM stereo portable radio with only a short telescoping whip antenna. However, I have never heard any other Florida stations on AM or FM since then. Another amazing DX catch I made, purely by accident, about 20-some years ago, was KOA-AM in Denver, Colorado. I heard this station when a (at the time) 10kW station in Cleveland went off the air for technical maintenance. That was the first and only time I ever heard any AM stations from Colorado here in northeastern Ohio. The best I can do, as far as nighttime DX is concerned on AM, is WCCO 830 in Minneapolis, Minnesota and sometimes 1040 WHO-AM in Des Moines, Iowa, but again, I have never heard anything further west than the latter since bagging KOA in the eighties.

BTW, I know what you mean about those AM stations that run syndicated talk shows and sports all night long, with only one station ID at or near the top of every hour. That, plus the fact that the FCC abolished AM "clear channels" in the mid-eighties, limiting even a 50kW station's range to 750 miles at night (as the former "clear-channel" stations must now use directional signal patterns at night in many cases), has taken almost all the fun and mystery out of AM DXing, unless you want to hang around the "graveyard" frequencies such as 1240, 1490, et al. and try to snag small local-service stations running 1kW or less.

I hardly ever listen to AM radio anymore because all the stations that used to be top-40 in the '60s-'70s (when I was growing up) are now talk or sports, not only in Cleveland but in every city in the U.S. nowadays. The only AM music station in Cleveland, for example, is Radio Disney on 1260, which was a top-40 rock-and-roll station from 1965 until 1974 (I have tapes of their old jingles). Couldn't get enough of that station (and a 50kW powerhouse on 1100, also a top-40 station at the time) as a teenager growing up in suburban Cleveland.

Ah, memories of how AM radio used to be.

Hi, Leadlike,
Lots of fun DX-ing the AM band. I'm in Cleona PA, up near Lebanon, so we ought to hear the same stuff. Others you ought to be able to add to your list easily:
660 WFAN New York City
690 Montreal, in French, their I.D. is "Info Six quatre-vingt-dix." phonetically "eenfo sees catra-van-dees."
750 WSB Atlanta
780 WBBM Chicago
870 WWL New Orleans
890 WLS Chicago
New Orleans and Atlanta are often better in the wee hours before dawn, but conditions vary. Does your console have a loop that rotates inside the cabinet? Could help to pick up some weaker stations. Otherwise if there's an antenna terminal on the back you could try adding ten or twenty feet of any insulated wire you have lying around and just lay it around the baseboard of the room, etc.

You join the legions of folks who started doing this almost a hundred years ago, the thrill of hearing a voice from hundreds or thousands of miles away.

Happy DX-ing!
Reece

Jeff,

I found CFZM through this wiki article. Their line following their call sign was 'the best of the best' which helped in my search:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CFZM

I agree with you on this dinky Florida station. I would like to think that as this was just playing the national ESPN sports feed, that some slovenly local ESPN affiliate was just repeating the Florida signal during their off hours. Hence, the Florida call sign rather than their own. Although if that was true, it would have to be a heck of a coincidence that they shared the same frequency on the dial...

I used to get a Raleigh station when I worked right on the Susquehanna river. The river formed sheer cliffs on all sides except to the south, so there was no television or FM radio. But we did get that one weak am station out of Raleigh. I believe it was WPTF as that was my first exposure to Art Bell and the freaky side of late night radio. I still get that station from time to time here, but that has been my record for southern reception.

Great memories, guys!

Ablethevoice, sounds like we had similar childhoods. I listened to CBS Mystery Radio Theater when it was still on, and Beaker Street booming out of Little Rock on KAAY. It seems like we had WLS on pretty much every night, all night, and listened to the news on it in the morning (the old station id- wLs!!- is still burned into my brain). I used to fall asleep to the radio *every* night (except for periods of my high school years when I got into other sorts of things..) practically until I was married.

My mom tells the story of listening to AM out of Shreveport, LA when she was a teenager, digging on Howlin' Wolf and other good stuff.. I realized one day that my mom is about Bob Dylan's age, and he has a similar story of hearing that great blues out of Shreveport. Pretty cool. Those were the days, when radio could literally spawn a revolution.

My AM experience nowadays is pretty much the same as radiotvnut's, I still tune in the opry broadcasts on WSM, listen to classical occasionally on the CBC via 990, when I can get it. And then there are the Mexican stations, which can be a real hoot.

One of these days I'm going to find myself another Yamaha T-80 and get a Kiwa pocket loop for it- that combo yields some pretty impressive nulls so you can pull the Mexican and Canadian stations out pretty easily. I'm a little down on the AM count at the moment, though my Kenwood KT-7500 doesn't do too badly.

ponderbear...so glad you mentioned "Beaker Street". A fantastic program that introduced a LOT of folks to music they otherwise wouldn't have been aware of. It's still the ONLY place I've ever heard "The hour of The Wolf" by The Hassles, and, of course, "The Legend of the Titanic" by Jaime Brockett....among a bunch of others. The story of the show is so cool...Clyde Clifford did it from KAAY's transmitter site instead of the studio. (Union rules prevented him from both being on the air and operating the controls at the studio...so it was off to a backup studio at the transmitter.) Sitting next to an air-cooled 50kW rig means LOTS of background noise when the mic is on, so Clyde tracked that famous "bleeep, bloop" stuff underneath his live breaks. The "bleep, bloop" is from an actual LP called "Head" by Head (what else did you expect?!?!?!) on Buddah records. (I mean, where else??) I found a copy in a huge pile of cutouts purchased by a friend who owned a record/stereo shop. He let me have first look at about 5,000 lps...and there it was! Clyde's still on the air with "Beaker Street"...log on to www.beakerstreet.com. He's on 94.1 The Point in Little Rock every Sunday nite, and it's streamed. The site even has archived files for downloading. Puts you right back, late at night in your 57 Chevy, hash pipe in hand. I mean, just take a look at the playlist from Sunday 11/16!!

It's Little Rock, AR. AK is Alaska :P

Nice story! I have a copy, too.. after I found out where those sounds were from I had to find it. Only the 60s (and early 70s by "contact high" :))could have made an album like that.