DXing without the Red Sox

Monday afternoon, I received word that WTIC (1080 kc) would go off the air for transmitter maintenance after the Boston Red Sox game.

I live 12 miles line-of-sight from WTIC's transmitter and its 50,000 watts 24/7 have made it impossible for me to hear anything but WTIC on 1080. So I planned to stay up for the down-time despite having to get up at 5 AM to go to work the next day.

As luck would have it, the Red Sox game started late and was almost four hours in length ending around 11:15 PM. The post game show ended about 11:45, when they finally pulled the plug at WTIC.

I listened intently to 1080 and could only detect one station way down in the mud playing MOR tunes that I did not recognize. When an announcer came on, he was unintelligible, but I hung on hoping that the signal would get stronger.

After about 10 minutes of down-time, WTIC came back on the air briefly, then went off again. About a minute later, it came on again.

After a minute or two, I assumed they were staying on the air for good, so I gave up and went to bed with nothing new in the log.

DXing with the Red Sox

Around sunset Saturday evening, I tuned across the AM band with my C.Crane CC Skywave receiver looking for broadcasts of the Boston Red Sox baseball game. Being a long-time Red Sox fan, I am very familiar with the voices of the Red Sox radio announcers, so I was able to identify broadcasts of the games even if the signal was down in the mud and/or competing with other radio stations on the same frequency. And as soon as I heard a game, I could identify the station quickly by referring to the list of radio stations on the Red Sox Radio Network (there are only a couple of stations on the same frequency).

I heard the game on a half dozen stations and two of them were new loggings:

• WDEV on 550 kc transmitting 5 kW 186 miles to my north in Waterbury, Vermont at 2242 UTC.
• WGHM on 900 kc transmitting 910 watts 108 miles to my north-northeast in Nashua, New Hampshire at 2252 UTC.

About 20 minutes later, I logged yet another station on the Bloomberg Radio Network:

• WTWK on 1070 kc transmitting 5 kW 205 miles to my north in Plattsburgh, New York at 2317 UTC.

TV E-skip from Mexico

Mike Schaffer, KA3JAW, in Easton, Pennsylvania, sent me a report about some great sporadic E propagation he experienced last month. 

Mike wrote, "The summer Es season had ended on August 1. But ten days later I grabbed a 1,580 mile Es double-hop television station in southern Mexico. It was an analog channel 4 call sign, XHKYU in Valladolid, Yucatan emitting low power at 4 kW."

Equipment used:

• Memorex MVDR-2102 - Full Format DVD Recorder, Analog TV Tuner
• Panasonic SA-DP1 DVD Stereo System 100 Watts
• Visteon HD Jump HD Radio
• No Brand TFT Color Monitor - For Automobile
• 55 Ft. RG-6 Quad (25' near antenna end, 30' near TV tuner end)
• Antennacraft Yagi model Y526 (cut-to-band) for VHF channels 2-6

Notes:

1. Antenna azimuth: West (270 deg.), Elevation: +30 deg. (shed roof pitch)
2. No antenna preamplifier was used

Mike posted videos of the event on YouTube:

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mB2BRgujBks (this is an online QSL card for the event)
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0zi5rDZmSoQ
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8DWWktSKUgg

DX on 1320 Revisited

In my previous post about my Wednesday night monitoring of 1320 kc, I wrote:

While I was trying to identify WCVR, I could occasionally hear another station playing Middle Eastern music that was most likely not emanating from this side of the Atlantic. Checking the World Radio TV Handbook this morning, I might have heard a station in Iran about 5600 miles away (Radio Tabriz transmitting 50 kW from Joifa on 1323 kc).

KAZ e-mailed me of a more likely source for what I heard on 1320: CJMR from Toronto, which broadcasts "Asian Vision / Rangla Punjab" in the time slot that I was monitoring.

DX on 1320

I have not posted here for over two weeks because my family and I had been dealing with the impending death and finally, the actual death of an immediate family member, who passed away early Labor Day morning.

After spending most of two days making arrangements and fielding phone calls, I needed a break. So last night, I grabbed my CCrane CC Skywave receiver and plopped myself in a lawn chair outdoors to see what I could hear.

There are a few AM channels in my log that only list one station because those logged stations are too close and/or too powerful to permit me to hear anything else. 

One of the usual suspects is WATR on 1320 kc. When I was growing up, I lived one block away from the WATR antenna farm and WATR was the only thing I could hear on my crystal radio. Now I live 7 miles away from WATR, so last night I thought I would work on 1320.

No matter which was I positioned the Skywave, I could not null out WATR completely, but I was able to position the radio so I could peak another signal that was also on 1320. 

The other station was broadcasting the Red Sox game. The only station in the Red Sox radio network on 1320 is WCVR in Randolph, Vermont, so I thought it was most likely WCVR.

I never heard a station identification, but after the game, there were ads for businesses in Randolph and nearby Waterbury, Vermont, so that confirmed it for me and I put WCVR in the log at 0255 UTC running only 66 watts, 160 miles to my north.

A nice catch, but there's more! 

While I was trying to identify WCVR, I could occasionally hear another station playing Middle Eastern music that was most likely not emanating from this side of the Atlantic. Checking the World Radio TV Handbook this morning, I might have heard a station in Iran about 5600 miles away (Radio Tabriz transmitting 50 kW from Joifa on 1323 kc).

Now that would be a very nice catch!