late night AM DX

[gadget73]

3 am, can't sleep, figured I'd fool with my tuner. I'm using an Onkyo TX-4500 with no external antenna, just the little bar antenna that comes pre-installed on the stereo. I'm in southern NJ, zip code 08079 if anyone really wants to know. A quick list of stations I pulled in that aren't really local to me that I could ID. I receive stuff on pretty much every spot on the scale, but a lot of the frequencies have so much overlapping data that I can't ID things.

650 WSM - Nashville
660 WFAN - NY,NY
700 WLW - Cincinatti, OH
720 WGN Chicago, IL
750 WSB - Atlanta, GA
760 WJR - Detroit, MI
770 WABC - NY,NY
780 WBBM - Chicago
810 WGY Schenectady, NY
830 - WTOP - Frederick, MD
1030 WBZ, Boston, MA
1510 - WLAC, Nashville
1620, KOZN Bellevue, NE

Theres a bunch more I could dig out but its now getting late and I've been at this for a good hour and a half now, and sitting on this wood floor is not the most comfy. I'm also listening to an ad for a sleep study for people who can't sleep. I think its a sign. Shame I'm not more patient to sit there and wait station by station to pick out a call sign, I'm sure I could do darn near a complete sweep on the dial.

At any rate, it looks like I've found myself something to waste time with late at night. With some luck and patience, maybe I can actually make a list of every single spot on the AM dial with a call sign that I've actually been able to ID.

 

[Brian]

You're aboout to join the ranks of another group of hobbists. AM DX'ing has quite a following, very much like SWL group. I have an old transistor am/fm/sw battery/ac prortable radio that I've played with and on the 1st try picked up WBZ in Boston from Toronto with the whip pulled up and a simple wire strung out. After that found a Chicago station and 1 from San Fransico CA.

I've been toying with installing the Philips 6731 into the bedroom system as it has a killer AM tuner and also do some DX'ing but been holding out thinking maybe I'd get a SW receiver and use it in the BR for listening and then have some serious AM and SW play.

You may want to hit the thrifts and pick up an American 5 tuber and add an antenna and have some fun.

 

[Sandy G]

Hmmmpf ! Hmmmmpf ! Kaff-kaff..Sput..Sputter...Well, m'boy, if you REALLY wanna get a VERY GOOD AM DXing machine, I know of one that has 25 tubes, weighs 85 lbs, & makes a dandy space heater....Most of the modern "receivers" treat Amplitude Modulation as an sfterthought..they're set up to get the local NewsTalkSportsWeather station & that's about it...Music sounds lousy on 'em..No wonder AM radio is slowly dying...But it don't have to be that way...

 

[Proconsul]

Gadget73: I can remember being 6 or 7, living in Virginia Beach in 1957, laying in bed using a crystal radio in the shape of a red plastic rocket to listen to southern radio stations as I fell asleep. Built a Heathkit shortwave when 13, listened to Pacific stations. In what was to become Silicon Valley years later, I'd pick up Wolfman Jack broadcasting out of Mexico (read his autobiography, it's very interesting), and all the clear-channel 50,000 watt US stations. I turned into heavy SW and AM listener when I joined the Peace Corps in 1975 and was sent to Africa. Now, 30 years and many radios later, I still have a large shortwave on my beside table here in Paris, and DX European AM stations all the time. Despite being a real hifi fan for decades -- my first job out of college was selling hifi at ALCO Home Electronics, Klipsch, McIntosh, etc -- I really like listening to radio because it make me feel connected to other people. Just me sitting alone in front a stereo, well, it can be nice, but it's just me. When listening to radio, especially with a great disc jockey (where's Tom Donahue when I need him?), I feel more a part of a community as the whispery voices and music of people halfway around the world reach out to me. OK, so I'm a closet romantic....

 

[Dan ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ]

Post 1970 as the AM band became more crowded, the manufacturers started narrowing the bandwidth on tuners to help eliminate interference between stations. Great for DX'ing but making the audio quality suck. A bandwidth switch could have been the solution and not that expensive to implement. That way local stations and powerful clear channel stations could maintain fidelity. But as Sandy noted, the AM sections were usually an afterthought, especially by the mid-seventies. Clear channel stations are all but gone nowadays and the last affordable radio I saw that had switchable bandwitdth was the discontinued GE Superadio III.

 

[gadget73]

I might try tuning in some stuff on my Magnavox. The FM section is dead on it but the AM section is pretty darn good. I'll probably have to give that a spin out in the workshop though, I don't have space up here to bring the naked tuner, the bare amp, plus the boxless speaker with the two 12" woofers up here for experimenting. I was using the Onkyo mostly because its sitting here and required zero effort other than turning the knob. I wasn't really making any special effort to see what kind of range I could get, more of a curiosity of what stations I could pull in with no special circumstances. It actually has a pretty decent sound on AM, nice and clear without that typical huge booming bass with no treble response that is the norm. The Magnavox is guilty of that, no highs, booming bass.

Brian: I've got an old American tube set (6 tube actually if memory serves, an old GE with octals) but it doesn't work so well. Its been a couple years since its even been plugged in, and I'd have to do some work on it to make sure it wouldn't explode or something if I powered it back up. Its not been recapped at all, and I sort of fear throwing the switch again after having it sit there collecting dust all this time. I don't think I've got the old Delco that I repainted a few years back either anymore. I don't remember seeing it since moving about 6 months ago but I don't recall if I tossed it or not. Speaker was shot on it, and it didn't work too well either. To be honest, I've never had a tube tabletop set with a tuner that was worth a darn other than my Grundig 970, which I know I don't have anymore. All the others used octal tubes and mostly struggled to pull in even local Philly stations (about 40 miles away). I did get some success re-peaking the IF sections but never fooled with it in depth to try and make them really work well.

 

[mhardy6647]

The old 50 kW clear channel AM's can come in quite handy. As an ex-Baltimoron now living near Boston, I sometimes listen to WBAL (1090) at night to check in on weather, local news, etc.

In fact, for a variety of reasons we've been in Baltimore A LOT since January... we always leave the northern 'burbs of B-more at 6 AM for a (generally) easy drive back to Boston. At 6AM, in the cold seasons, I can still pick up WBZ and get an idea of what sort of weather will greet me when I get home in the early afternoon!

A little on AM bandwidth: Some of the old "AM-FM stereo" tuners of the late 1950's, built for AM-FM stereo simulcasting before the FCC approved the multiplex FM stereo we now all know and love are capable of "hi-fi" AM reception. Many if not most also had switchable bandwidth. Some of these tuners are available quite inexpensively (e.g., Sherwood S-2000 and Fisher FM 80R).

EDIT: OK, before the superheterodyne police jump all over me, neither of the above-mentioned/below-pictured tuners were built for simulcast AM/FM stereo... but they DO have switchable AM bandwidth, and I happen to own -- and enjoy -- an example of each (the S-2000 in the photo is mine; I don't have a picture of my FM-80R).

 

[RxDx]

Shame I'm not more patient to sit there and wait station by station to pick out a call sign, I'm sure I could do darn near a complete sweep on the dial.

I'd be surprised if you could. Above 1200, it gets really crowded.

At any rate, it looks like I've found myself something to waste time with late at night. With some luck and patience, maybe I can actually make a list of every single spot on the AM dial with a call sign that I've actually been able to ID.

Yeah, I enjoy DXing, AM, FM, and TV. I'm just south of DC.

I've got an Onkyo T-4711, Yamaha TX-950, and an Alpine cassette car radio. What's surprising is the Alpine betters the other two for AM sensitivity, selectivity, clarity of daytime reception, and resistance to overload and harmonics. In fact, there is no overload or harmonics, even with a 150 foot long-wire AM antenna on it (except for that damn IBOC trash 2 channels each way of a station).

At night, I get 1620 Virgin Islands regularly (1000 watts, 1600 miles). That's probably the furthest/weakest I've gotten. 1640 Biloxi MS WTNI (1000 watts, 840 miles) usually shows up. Don't get much west of the Mississippi, but probably because the antenna mostly faces north/south.

 

[GordonW]

Got an old Ross RE8000 a while back... never thought how much entertainment it would result in.

I get most of the same list in the first post, with a few notable additions:

820 WBAP Dallas TX
840 WHAS Louisville KY
870 WWL New Orleans LA
880 WCBS NYC
1020 KDKA Pittsburgh PA
1120 KMOX St. Louis MO

What got me started, was Jim Hawkins WLW page ( http://hawkins.pair.com/wlw.shtml ). Just wanted to see if I could get a signal from that old Blaw-Knox tower... no problem! :thmbsp:

Cool thing? With WSM Nashville and WLW Cincinatti BOTH readily receivable from here, I'm getting signal from BOTH of the original, legendary Blaw-Knox diamond towers still in operation!

Also, KDKA Pittsburgh is an interesting story... arguably, the FIRST commercial AM radio station... so early on, that the call letters were part of the sequence that, at that time, was for shore-to-ship broadcast! In 1920, there WAS no formal call letter system for commercial broadcasting as we know it!

Have to agree with the thumbs-up for Alpine car radios for AM DX... was driving down to my parents' house in south GA in my little truck with an about-10-year-old Alpine CD/receiver... from Macon GA south, I was enjoying WLW, WSM and WWL at different times, while driving down an interstate highway, with NOTHING but the normal car antenna!

Regards,
Gordon.

 

[gadget73]

I hooked up the Magnavox last night and it does seem to pull better than the Onkyo. Problem is, it was so darn crowded I was having a hard time pulling things through, and in other cases the talk shows just droned and droned for so long without giving up a station ID that I moved on. The couple I pulled in last night that I could ID were:

600 - WCHT Escanaba, Michigan
1120 - KMOX St Louis, MO
1150 - WGBR Goldsboro, NC
1110 - WBT Charlotte, NC

This is kind of fun, just fiddling with the dial to see what comes in. Nice and low tech for a change, though I will admit to using http://www.radio-locator.com/ to get station locations and confirm call letters.

 

[Sandy G]

Another couple that are on 1150 are WCRK in Morristown, Tennessee-"Hometown Radio", & WGOW in Chattanooga. Think they are a talker now, back in the day they were "The Music People". 1070 is WFLI, Lookout Mountain/Chattanooga, they're Gospel now, but when the world was young they were Top 40, "Jet Fly".

 

[OvenMaster]

This is why I have always wanted to put an old AM car radio in a box with a speaker and power supply, with a fender antenna sticking out of the top. Any AM section on my past receivers and even my T-80 just suck. :yuck: Too much power line noise and local interference that the car radios ignore.
Tom

 

[Jeffhs]

This is why I have always wanted to put an old AM car radio in a box with a speaker and power supply, with a fender antenna sticking out of the top. Tom

I did just that with an old car radio in the 1970s, only I mounted the radio (with an external speaker, of course) in an old TV cabinet and had mounted an equally old car antenna to the back of the cabinet. Don't remember offhand what I used for a power supply, but the bottom line is that the whole system worked great. The radio was probably from a 1950s car, as the tuning dial had the Conelrad markings at 640/1240 kHz. I used this radio a couple of years and enjoyed it (much better sensitivity and fidelity than the small transistor sets of the period, and certainly better sound than today's gutless-wonder AM radios from Korea); wish I could have kept it, but I moved two years or so later and had to give it up.

The old car radios were built for distance reception and sound fidelity, which makes them excellent home receivers with just a bit of modification (external antenna, external speaker, and a power supply capable of handling the current drain, not to mention installing the whole thing in a nice cabinet). In fact, Popular Electronics magazine in the 1960s had an article which described this conversion step by step. The only thing the article discouraged was trying this dodge with a car radio equipped with power tuning (such as were found in Cadillac and Lincoln automobiles in the fifties/sixties). The extra current drain of the power tuning motor would mean having to build a power supply using a very large and heavy transformer--if, that is, you could find a transformer large enough to handle the current drain of the entire radio, power tuning system and all.

These sets are powerful DX machines because they are built to work with just a 30" long whip antenna (some car sets today have even shorter antennas which aren't even mounted to either fender, but to one of the body pillars near the driver-side window--I'm darned if I know how they can work so well, especially in areas which are 30+ miles from the nearest stations, though the short antennas probably work well in the city or suburbs, within a station's normal service area); just imagine the DX you could hear on a car radio hooked up to a good long-wire antenna!

 

[RxDx]

Car battery's the ticket. if you've got the right location. Zero noise.

 

[Jeffhs]

I might try tuning in some stuff on my Magnavox. The FM section is dead on it but the AM section is pretty darn good.

I have a Zenith H480 AM/FM/FM-stereo clock radio (1980 vintage) with a dead FM section, but like your Magnavox, the AM section really pulls in stations after dark, even using just the built-in loopstick antenna. I don't use that radio very often, but probably should dust it off and try to DX with it one of these evenings. I also have a Zenith C845 and K731 which are great at pulling in DX with just their internal antennas. The '845 in particular has a tuned RF stage that works on both AM and FM, so it should be (and is) one great DX machine once the AM band opens up after dark--again, using only its built-in Wavemagnet AM antenna. I hear many small stations (5kW or less) on this radio even during the daytime as well, as I live near the south shore of Lake Erie; my AM dial just lights up with stations from Toronto and Windsor, Ontario, Canada (not to mention the locals from Cleveland, most of which are over 40 miles away from me) during daylight hours, with the FM doing the same thing in the spring, summer and early fall when the FM broadcast band opens waaaay up for DX (I hear stations in Detroit, Windsor, Toledo, Ohio, etc. when the conditions are right in the summer).

DXing is a bit more difficult these days since the FCC did away with clear channels about 25 years ago, but it's still a challenge; in fact, I think it is probably even more challenging on those former clear frequencies, with small local stations, many of which were formerly daytime-only, now in operation on those channels at low power. Hearing stations in Boston, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, etc. is par for the course throughout the Northeast and part of the Midwest, but you have to use a really good antenna if you want to snag DX from the Southwest or the West Coast from that part of the country. I live near Cleveland and have never heard any AM stations further west of here than Dallas, Texas, although I did hear Denver's KOA-AM 850 one night about 25 years ago when a local Cleveland station on that frequency was off the air for technical maintenance.

 

[gadget73]

I should probably consider an outside antenna. So far I've been using just the stick antennas. I also do get a lot of line noise. Both this room and my workshop are running off sections of the old wiring in the house along with a bunch of other junk. I think the line out in the workshop has the freezer on it, plus I know its running the compact fluorescents and then runs over to the garage for the single incandescent in there. The grounding is not correct, and the setup on my workbench is powered through a thin flimsy extension cord that also has a fan plugged into it. In short, lots of noise. The Onkyo in here is on a circuit with the entire upstairs of the house, which includes 3 ceiling fans, 3 computers, and misc other stuff. Its a shame I tossed the old tube Dodge AM radio I used to have. It went when I moved, but I imagine with a little fiddling it could have been made into a decent DX rig.

 

[Sandy G]

Yeah, try running a wire out 50-60' or so, as far away as possible from power lines as possible, preferably 8-10' anyway off the ground. May work great, may not. Antenna placement is somewhat of a "black art".

 

[JimJ[VT]]

One of these days I'll have to set up a "Beverage" type antenna...400-500 feet of wire, terminated at the end with a power resistor (IIRC, the exact plans escape me at the moment).

Very directional, and very deadly for DX on the lower bands

 

[Hepcat]

This past Sunday night we drove down to Cordele, GA to take a senic train ride with the grandson on Monday. I knew we'd only be there one night so I didn't bother with my XM rig. I had my little Sangean DT200V pocket transistor in my overnight bag. (CCrane advertised it as one of the stongest AM pocket radios). And I wanted to listen to Drudge with the earphones after I got in bed.

Cordele is near the Florida border in south Georgia. We were in a first floor room facing south in the Holiday Inn Express. I listened to Drudge just fine from WABC in NYC. Swear to God. Picked up a bunch of other stations too.

 

[Mark W.]

A suggestion for an easily acquired receiver for your late night fun would be the HEATHKIT Mohican AM/SW receiver quite a few show up on ebay. Combine that with a 75-100' long wire antenna 20 feet off the ground E/W or N/S orientation your choice. Get long AM dial with a bandspread for detail tuning Even the built in WHip can be impressive. If you buy one try to get one with the Battery power supply. The eat C size batteries but the super clean power is a plus. You can always rig up a simple wall adapter for AC when you want it.

I have the batter supply and I'm going to add a switch and DC power jack so I can switch between DC and AC power. That way I can always have a Good set of Batteries for emergency or the best signal noise levels when I want them.

I have also thought about setting up a 12V 7ahm gel cell on a trickle charger to stay at full charge in case I need an emergency battery


I used to do this when I was 13-14 and could pull in stations from every where. Of course I also had my long wire hung up in the tops of two fir trees dad had the tops cut out of must have been 50' up and a full 100' long. I had 2 screen door springs on each end to handle the movement when the wind blew!

I'm going to get around to setting up a 50' N/S and 75' E/W long wires here ASAP. my lot is only 60X105 so that's about all I can hope for. I could go on the angle but I would have no way to get the antenna up that high from the corners. I have tall fence lines the other way.