So in my tuning around on the AM BCB
last night here in Hartford CT, I was
suprised when I came upon 690 kHz.
There is usually a high power Canadian
ESPN station dominating the channel.
(I'll have to mention the info on that
station later.) And when I say dominating
I mean dominating. Many nights it sounds
like a local or semi local. And it is ESPN sports.
So you can imagine my surprise when I heard
classic rock on the channel instead. Classic
rock? On 690?? Well, yeah, it was there and
I heard a callsign almost immediately. WELD.
WELD? Right. I've gotten this before. I looked
up station specs and distance from me. WELD -
Fisher, West Virginia. To the west of me (sort of)
382 miles away. I looked up the power and then
remembered. 3000 watts day 500 watts critical
hours 14 watts night... 14 watts? Huh? It was too
loud for that. That's what I thought last night.
That's what I'm still thinking today.
Of course I really don't know.
Brooce, Part 15, Hartford, CT
Signals can do some pretty strange things, I've heard many oddities over the years on the AM broadcast band. TIS stations are low power and I've heard them a few hundreds of miles away, upper band above 1600, before it opened for commercial broadcasters.
If you didn't get Montreal at all, and a small station was coming in from the south, you probably had some unusual propagation conditions going on. I've had it near sunset where a station would go to their night power and still come in strong, and I also think some stations modulate harder at night to cover more of the noise that they'd have at lower power.
Classic Rock on AM, I think the Legassy should be informed!
I'll have to check out 690 and see what I get at different times of the day. It may get me to experiment again on AM.
Ya know I've caught this station in Texas as well. They probably on occassion "forget" to go to night power and leave the day power on.
I'll be back.
Brooce
night time football authorization 😉
In the time I've been AM DXing, I think I have
heard a few stations stay on after they were
supposed to have signed off. And yup, it was
for sporting events. Altho, I have only heard
this a few times in many years.
I have heard some stations run day power/pattern
at night - - they have stuck out like a sore
thumb on a channel that was usually just full
of a clump of weak competing stations. instead,
what is there is: 40 over S9 on the meter. (When
I was fortunate enough to have a receiver with
a big old illuminated S meter (bright orange in fact)
which was my Hammarlund HQ-140X when I was
young.) Almost 40 years after I got rid of that HQ-140X;
I got another one and it is just as good as the first one.
I love listening to the AM BCB on a big old vacuum tube
radio. Actually this second HQ-140X is at my brother's
house. He's a really good guy so he deserves to borrow
it for a while. (Especially since he gave it to me as a gift
to replace the first one.) Eventually when he sends it back
I'll get to look at that cool analog meter again.
OH YEAH - - and those few other AMers I have heard at night that
weren't supposed to be there all discovered their mistake
and fixed it after a new days. I know that is not always
the case.
I have seen (or heard) some pretty weird AM BCB propagation.
I try to follow the space weather and A and K index readings,
although I am only now beginning to understand how it all
fits together.
A while back I heard the BBC Radio Five on 693 kHz loudly (here
in Hartford, CT) for 2 nights in a row - I guess it must have
been 10 years ago. After those 2 nights I never heard it
again. This was out in my backyard with a Sony ICF-2010.
(Since then I think that 693 transmitter has been turned off,
but that was many years after I heard it. I think I should
have logged it at least a few more times.)
I love the AM BCB, which is why I do Part 15 AM, I guess.
Brooce
I'll have to get some new batteries for the Grundig and see if I can pick up that Rock station on 690 since I live in VA. Maybe I'll figure a way to finally get out with my Talking House transmitter and when I can get a mile or two I'll put that one back on line.
The TH will certainly do that with the external ATU, the wire antenna might be able to stretch to a very weak mile under optimal conditions. That being said, try switching it around to different power outlets. My TH had extremely better coverage on a particular outlet in the room, never figured out why. It wasn't near a window either and yet it got out probably 1,000 feet, which is pretty good for any indoor setup.
I agree, what I've found as rule of opposable thumb is that a ten footer, a 3 meter antenna should be outdoors, vertical, and be placed so it's as far from other objects as possible, not just metal objects, but trees and other buildings too. A cleared one acre field with the antenna at the center would probably be ideal.
The second part to that is match the antenna well and peak it up for the highest output, plus have a solid ground on the negative RF bus of the transmitter, earth ground with radials, counterpoise, existing large metal object.
I believe that if you do that, you could get ten to 100 times farther than a talking house wire inside.
The Lagacy, there's more classic rock on AM radio, look for WXYG, The Goat, they're doing AM stereo on radio 540, and it's all classic and progressive rock, so there's another station!
Years ago I purchased a Yaesu FRG-100 communications receiver because I had an interest in listening to the shortwave broadcast bands and wanted a radio that was good quality, small size, and easy to use. This radio seemed to fit the bill.
Compared to the 73 year old vacuum tube BCB-1004C and the 50 year old Drake TR3 tube rig its receiver is only OK. On the AM broadcast band ti never seemed to be very good in sensitivity.
Snooping around the internet I discovered that this radio has an attenuator which is automatically switched in when tuned to the AM broadcast band supposedly to reduce adjacent channel bleedover. This seems like a stupid thing to do in a "communications" receiver and doubly stupid because it has a 4 step atteunuator controlled from the front panel. Now I know why this thing is so lacking for BCB DXing. A cold winter's night project will be to remove the BCB attenuator (three resistors) to find out if this takes the cotton out of its ear.
Guess it just costs too much to produce a good high intercept point front end. As with Brooce's experience there is something nice about the old tube sets with the orange S meters and I know for sure the BCB-1004C doesn't switch in an attenuator, though it does have a manual control for RF gain, as does the Drake, which is obvious and easily adjusted. Yaesu seems to have decided that the operator of this radio would not be capable of setting the RF gain so they threw manual setting away and used resistors insted. I wonder if the same trick is used in other modern "high performance" radios.
Neil
I'm old school. All this new stuff seems to be Chinese crap. Imagine my joy when I saw this:
I am definately springing for this in the near future. An easy build. Anyone else see this as good for an Air Monitor?
Doug
Now if my listeners had a Radio like that they may be able to receive my station a mile or two away. Especially if they were to have a huge loop antenna connected to it but from what I saw I bet this thing could receive very well.
As far as an open area for my TH (iAM Radio) I have trees around me too. I can't imagine getting an antenna up like a 10 foot pole in the middle of the yard of our complex. But I could put up a stealth antenna. However anything stealth won't work very well.
I thought about a J pole AM antenna. A J pole works very good on FM and Hams use them when they can't put up a large antenna. I've found out too that with my home made ATU it seems to do better with a 6 foot piece of wire vs the one that came with the TH. This tells me that with such low power on part 15 a longer antenna may be cutting your nose off if you know what I mean. And if its too think it seems to not get as high a reading either.
If I could only see well I'd just get a amplifier and try carrier current. A little town like mine probably only has one power transformer. Then I'd get out for miles.
With some Album Rock stations on AM I think an AM Stereo station like mine will give AM a boost.
I lost them.
I'll just mention one - Neil - if you take those
attenuators out - you'll probably need some
kind of preselector on that FRG-100. (As I'm
sure you know.)
I found my 2 HQ-140X receivers to be very
quiet.
My brother and I have a Yeasu FRG-7700 radio
that has bounced around between a bunch of us.
It needs to be recapped now, but we had some good
luck with it many years ago - when we added a
preselector. We heard a Part 15 longwave beacon on
180 kHz running 1 watt about 10 miles away. (It was
cw.) Without the preselector, we never would have
been able to do it. The front end of the radio would
have folded up. I can't remember if we went around the
attenuators or not. The receiving antenna was some kind
of long wire.
Brooce
A few more odds and ends to follow.
Brooce
Brooce, good point about maybe needing a preselector. That is more than I plan to do since I only do casual DXing. My aggravation with Yaesu"s solution is that there is a four step front panel attenuator so I don't see the need to hide one inside for the BCB. It would seem to make sense that if the user hears bleedover and if attenuation is the solution then the user could switch it in when needed with the existing front panel control.
Just like word processing software which tries to automate and guess what I want to do and aggravates the dickens out of me, so does hardware designed to do the same.
Neil