Quote:
Originally Posted by leadlike
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...
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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.