WSKP 1180

I sat in an icebox (also known as my car) for nearly a half-hour during my lunch hour watching snow flurry onto the windshield while tuning the radio searching for a new entry for the log. I settled on 1180 kc listening to what I thought was WHAM out of Rochester, NY.

WHAM is already in the log, but I had given up finding anything new and decided to listen to the oldies. But looking up WHAM in my log, I had it logged as a talk radio station. Either they changed their format or I had something new (WHAM was my only 1180 log entry so far).

I stuck it out and at 1758 UTC, the station identified as Hope Valley, Rhode Island’s WSKP. Transmitting 1800 watts 54 miles to my east, it had a solid S-4 signal.

Finding WFTU

In the previous installment of Surfin',  I wrote about adding WFTU to my AM radio log, but mentioned, "Oddly, I can not find a photo of the WFTU transmitter site. Radio-Locator points to 40° 54' 48" N,  72° 39' 16" W, but I don't see any antennas at that location on Google or Bing Maps. Go figure!"

Tom Dunbar, W6ESL, sent me an e-mail that he found the antennas.

"It took some messing around, and peering diligently at the photos provided by Mapper but I finally 'found' the 2 antenna array for this station.

"The two antennas are very difficult to pick out of the overhead photo - they are now\t in a neatly mowed field, but are in trees / scrub / brush where an old Drive In theater once was (according to the Topo map that Mapper allows you to look at).

"If you go to coordinates: N 40 54' 44" W 72 39' 12", and zoom in, you will eventually see two white dots.  The towers them selves are pretty invisible - they are essentially coming straight up into your eye.  However, if you look carefully, you will see the shadows of the two - straight lines coming out of thee two white dots.

"They are hard to see, but they are there."

After reading Tom's e-mail and revisiting the maps, I figured out why I did not find the WFTU towers. The coordinates that Tom provided differed from the coordinates provided by Radio-Locator. Using Tom's coordinates, I found the towers immediately (see the Bing Maps screen capture above), while the Radio-Locator coordinates were off just enough for me to miss the towers.

Now that I know that the documented coordinates are not necessarily dead-on, in the future I will make sure to look around the coordinates if the antennas don’t pop out at me as I did to find the CIWW transmitter site, whose coordinates were off by over a half-mile!

By the way, midday yesterday I added a needed Connecticut AM radio station to my log: the very weak S-0 to S-1 WSTC in Stamford transmitting 800 watts 49 miles southwest. Equipment used was the stock radio and antenna in my 2007 Subaru Outback Sport.

Until next time, keep on Surfin’!

1310 x 2

During lunch hour on Tuesday, I dialed up the six frequencies occupied by the six stations on my Connecticut AM Radio Stations Needed List and heard nothing but noise on all except 1310 kHz, where needed station WICH operates from Norwich.

The S-5 signal consisted of Spanish music, which did not match the modus operandi of WICH. But my AM radio station app indicated that two other relatively nearby stations might fit the bill: WRVP in Mount Kisco and WORC in Worcester. So I sat on 1310 for 10 minutes until the top of the hour, when the announcer identified the station as WRVP.

Located in the Hudson Valley 53 miles to the west-southwest, WRVP transmits 5 kW and represents the 176th AM station in my log and the first on 1310 kHz, which is usually bombarded by WATR on 1320 kHz.

Driving home from work five hours later, my radio was still tuned to 1310, but WRVP was gone and a very weak station was in its place varying between an S-1 and S-2. When the announcer mentioned 5 degrees in the weather forecast, I decided to sit in my driveway until the top of the hour for station identification since the local weather forecast was about 30 degrees higher!

It was worth the wait when I heard the station ID of CIWW in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, transmitting 50 kW 290 miles to the north-northwest.

Equipment used was the stock radio and antenna in my 2007 Subaru Outback Sport. Photo courtesy of Bing Maps.

Four on the Fourth

After logging WILI on Sunday, I wondered how many other AM stations in Connecticut I could add to my log. So I perused a couple of websites and put together a Connecticut AM Radio Station Needed List consisting of eight stations.

Using the list, I logged two of the needed stations midday today, log entries 172 and 173:

WLAD transmitting 1 kW on 800 kHz from Danbury, CT, 35 miles WSW with a solid S-7.

WNLK transmitting 1 kW on 1350 kHz from Norwalk, CT, 42 miles SW with an S-1 signal competing with another S-1 signal on 1350.

Six to go!

In the evening, I logged entries 174 and 175:

WILK transmitting 5 kW on 980 kHz from Wilkes-Barre, PA, 160 miles W with an S-2 signal.

WDEL transmitting 5 kW on 1150 kHz from Wilmington, DE, 180 miles SW with an S-0 to S-1 signal.

Logged WLAD and WNLK using the stock radio and antenna in my 2007 Subaru Outback Sport. Logged WILK and WDEL using a C. Crane CCRadio-SW receiver and C. Crane CC Twin Coil Ferrite antenna.

(Photo courtesy of Bing Maps.)

Nerdy People Trick

I own a TomTom XXL 550 GPS and have a subscription for quarterly map updates. I bought the GPS from Woot for $60 --- the map subscription costs more than the hardware.

Anyway, I get an e-mail a few days ago informing me that a new update was ready for me to download. So I connect my GPS to the Mac and run the update software, which downloads the update via the Internet and installs it in my GPS.

At DSL speeds, this is a few hour process, so while the download was in progress, I noticed that the GPS had an icon on my desktop as if it was another disk drive. So I decided to poke around and see what was stored in the GPS.

I found a folder called "Art" and in that folder was a subfolder called "Cars." I opened that folder and saw that it contained bitmapped images of the various vehicles you can choose to represent yours on the GPS. My choice was a green SUV that kind of resembles my green 2007 Subaru Outback Sport.

The nerd LED lit up over my head and I wondered if I could take a photo of my Subaru, Photoshop it so that it matches the size and format of the other images in the Cars subfolder. I took a few photos, played around with the images in Photoshop for about a half hour, and added a new image into the Cars subfolder.

After the map update was downloaded and installed, I checked to see if I could select my Subaru image from the TomTom options. My image was one of the options, so I selected it and tested it by and sure enough, my Subaru is now represented exactly by the GPS.

I can almost read the call sign on my car's license plate, but not quite!

Subaru

Astronomy is one of my interests. I own a telescope and subscribe to Sky & Telescope.

The August issue of Sky & Telescope arrived and I was reading it last night. During my read, I came across references to the Subaru Telescope in Hawaii. I never heard of it and since I own a Subaru, I wondered if the folks that built my car had anything to do with the telescope. Did they help fund it or what?

Wrong!

According to Wikipedia, "Subaru Telescope (In Japanese: すばる望遠鏡) is the 8.2 metre flagship telescope of the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, located at the Mauna Kea Observatory on Hawaii. It is named after the open star cluster known in English as the Pleiades."

Well, that cleared up the matter.

By the way, I already knew that Subaru was Japanese for the Pleiades, which was the inspiration for the cool Subaru logo. But I wondered why there were only six stars in the logo, whereas the Pleiades was famous for its "Seven Sisters" stars.

Wikipedia solved that mystery, too. The six stars in the logo allude to the six companies that merged to create Fuji Heavy Industries, the transportation conglomerate whose automobile division is Subaru.