Up front : I'm an FM DXer only by incidence. I know little about the hobby other than that queer conditions affect it from time to time.
See, a few of us hooked up one of those Ramsey Part .15 transmitters last night, adjusted it to 93.5, plugged in some music peculiar only to our tastes, and drove around for about a half an hour in the hills of these parts. We had an indoor TV set of rabbit ears at the attic window. We might have been a few extra feet above what the FCC might allow for average terrain.
Well, okay. Maybe 312 feet.
The time was 8:20 - 8:45 PM.
Up at the mall was the destination monitoring spot, itself on a hill, eighty feet higher den us! Woof! Each time we do this, we buy mall pretzels and scoot around the parking lots. The mall itself has a spiral-type approach into it and out because it's so high. There are several rock-cuts and other physical/geographical obstacles. But it's always fun.
Thing is, our 'station' went about a half a block before getting slapped around by what we calculated as at least five stations. Two of those were Country. One was what had to've been the Rap station from near Harrisburg PA. One * probably * was the Hot A/C station from Stroudsburg PA, the opposite direction.
It was impossible to listen for more than ten seconds to any one of them, even while parked in a ripe, resonant spot. Each station took turns throbbing in. I'm doubting this was tropo, inasmuch as (in my experience with trope) some unlikely station will squat that way there for hours.
And I'm questioning that it was E-Skip as well. We were getting strobes of stations last evening, as if they were on an FCC-approved ten-second rotation. The last ES we encountered was a few years ago, when we took this same transmitter, set it on 107.9 with its old frequency chip, and drove around a hill only to be blown into the Susquehanna for :45 minutes by Oldies 108 out of Sarasota. (I did get Spanish on 107.9 that afternoon after WSRZ Sarasota left us ; might've been Key West, but that'll remain a mystery, I'm sure).
So, given all of that: What the devil kind of reception * were * we experiencing? Were any other EC'ers getting it?
* The fifth station, often dominant, was a sports-talk station. The callers sounded southwest-accent oriented. There was lots of talk about 'The Aggies', and other teams in the SEC .... Georgia, Alabama, etc. The only 'Aggies' I'm familiar with is Texas A&M. The show host was named Paul-something. He had a much milder version of the accent, perhaps from a big metro area like Dallas, where a lot of the rural burrs have been diluted.
TIA !
See, a few of us hooked up one of those Ramsey Part .15 transmitters last night, adjusted it to 93.5, plugged in some music peculiar only to our tastes, and drove around for about a half an hour in the hills of these parts. We had an indoor TV set of rabbit ears at the attic window. We might have been a few extra feet above what the FCC might allow for average terrain.
Well, okay. Maybe 312 feet.
The time was 8:20 - 8:45 PM.
Up at the mall was the destination monitoring spot, itself on a hill, eighty feet higher den us! Woof! Each time we do this, we buy mall pretzels and scoot around the parking lots. The mall itself has a spiral-type approach into it and out because it's so high. There are several rock-cuts and other physical/geographical obstacles. But it's always fun.
Thing is, our 'station' went about a half a block before getting slapped around by what we calculated as at least five stations. Two of those were Country. One was what had to've been the Rap station from near Harrisburg PA. One * probably * was the Hot A/C station from Stroudsburg PA, the opposite direction.
It was impossible to listen for more than ten seconds to any one of them, even while parked in a ripe, resonant spot. Each station took turns throbbing in. I'm doubting this was tropo, inasmuch as (in my experience with trope) some unlikely station will squat that way there for hours.
And I'm questioning that it was E-Skip as well. We were getting strobes of stations last evening, as if they were on an FCC-approved ten-second rotation. The last ES we encountered was a few years ago, when we took this same transmitter, set it on 107.9 with its old frequency chip, and drove around a hill only to be blown into the Susquehanna for :45 minutes by Oldies 108 out of Sarasota. (I did get Spanish on 107.9 that afternoon after WSRZ Sarasota left us ; might've been Key West, but that'll remain a mystery, I'm sure).
So, given all of that: What the devil kind of reception * were * we experiencing? Were any other EC'ers getting it?
* The fifth station, often dominant, was a sports-talk station. The callers sounded southwest-accent oriented. There was lots of talk about 'The Aggies', and other teams in the SEC .... Georgia, Alabama, etc. The only 'Aggies' I'm familiar with is Texas A&M. The show host was named Paul-something. He had a much milder version of the accent, perhaps from a big metro area like Dallas, where a lot of the rural burrs have been diluted.
TIA !