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AM Frequency of the Week: 1070

cyberdad

cyberdad

Time for one of the more "diverse" stops on the AM dial. What are you guys heaing on 1070 these days?

For me, on the northwest fringes of suburban Chicago daytime it's a fair-weak WTSO from Madison, WI. 10kw from about 75 miles away, but slightly nulled in my direction to protect WFNI (ex-WIBC) from Indianapolis. Driving around with a good car radio, "holes" in WTSO's signal often (but not always) result in WFNI breaking through.

At night the "diverse" part kicks in. Various possibilities depending on conditions and how you orient your radios. Usually, but again not always, WFNI and WTSO alternate being on top of the pile. Sometimes, however, it can be CHOK. Although I haven't heard them recently. (did they migrate to FM?). I've also occasionally heard Wichita (as KFDI), Memphis (WDIA), Hannibal, MO (KHMO), and even Estherville, IA (KILR).

Of course, the big prize around here is KNX. They used to be almost semi-regular here at night, but now it's a tough catch. I'm pretty sure I heard them a couple of times in the mix this past winter. And even this morning before dawn. But it's been at least two years since I've been able to positively ID them. I think they've dropped their "traffic and weather together" sounder. If that's true, it's certainly not helping. That sounder used to blast through a lot of noise!
 
WFLI LookoutMountain most days. WAPI can be in there as well during the day.

At night its a mix of WFNI, WAPI, WFLI, WNCT, WDIA. I have heard KNX here early in the morning.

North of Atlanta
 
In the near north Chicago burbs daytime it's usually WTSO weak. WFNI/WIBC is mostly underneath although it comes in stronger just before sunset. I've heard CHOK, KHMO, pre sunrise. I've heard WAPI pre-sunset. WDIA is rare--haven't heard it in quite awhile. KNX used to be an easy catch for me pre-sunrise in the fall. Haven't tried for it yet this year.
 
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KNX is usually pretty easy to catch at night except right here in central Phoenix where slop from KDUS-1060 interferes.
 
Warminster PA(Philly 'burbs):

Daytime: splatter from 1060 KYW.
Night: CBA Moncton NB, before they signed off a few years ago. Now, mainly WINA Charlottesville VA.
 
In Northwest Arkansas -

Daytime / Afternoon - Not much

Late afternoon / Evening / Nighttime - A mix of stations at times -

I have heard these stations on 1070:
WAPI, Birmingham, AL - (Originally heard in November 2013)
KHMO, Hannibal, MO - (Originally heard in November 2015)
KFTI, Wichita, KS - (Originally heard in September 2016)
KNX, Los Angeles, CA - (Originally heard on November 11, 2016, at 11:59 PM CST)
 
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Usually heard CHOK. Used to be 5000 watts Nondirectional Days, 1000 watts directional Nights. Heard WIBC on Day pattern once during an emergency during Nighttime. Heard KNX a few times, Traffic and Weather every ten minutes.
 
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KNX was also my first mainland catch on Maui when I was there in 1994, and strong every night of my stay. Ironicaly, I never heard them during my year at McKinley High School in Honolulu. Too many sticks in my neighborhood made for a lousy DX location. Closest....as I've posted before...was KPOI (1380), two blocks away.
 
In East Tennessee, WFLI, Chattanooga by day and WFNI (the old WIBC) nights. Sometimes it will override WFLI a couple of hours before sunset.

1070 is an interesting frequency. I once lived in Lafayette, IN, about a 45 minute drive from WIBC's towers. By day it was usually solid WIBC, though I had heard WAPI around sunset. The dominant station at night was CHOK, Sarnia, which at the time ran a national network called "GTO-Good Time Oldies". WIBC was pretty much in the background with it's southeast pattern.
 
1070 here in the day is semi-local 10K omni WKOK Sunbury PA.

At night* they are largely inaudible despite the insistence of three different sources who claim that the 1000-watt southwest tongue of a signal should put them atop the channel here.

As one might expect, SSS and nighttimes have been pretty good here for the logbook.

SSS's have provided WIBC Indianapolis, WSCP from upstate NY, and something called 'The Beach'. I've got that last one listed as 'tentative'. That means I don't count it as an official 'catch' until I find info to certify it to my beyond-all-doubt tastes :)

Nighttimes here most often had CHOK Ontario atop. Sometimes WIBC.
Does anyone know if CBA Moncton is still on the air? They should be a copper-pipe cinch if they still exist.

* The wife and I, because we got lost, wound up driving around the 'back' of WKOK's towers one night, northwest of their blinking array. The situation wasn't really dramatic or life-imperiling. But instead of a map, we actually used the WKOK signal to DF us back on the right roads. Wow -- the nulls and the audio of that sort of electromagnetic incest was music to this DXer's ears. The wife asked: 'This is a nearby station ?!?'
 
A couple of you guys have mentioned WAPI...

When I drove through Birmingham, early last month, it was off. I checked it a couple of times, and 1070 was empty on each occasion. So I'm not sure if what I encountered was a one-off, or if they've gone dark. Has anyone checked it out lately?

I should have mentioned in my OP that I have heard WAPI a handful of times here at home. Always around sunset and always on 50kw day power. With one exception. That was one winter night when they stayed at 50kw ND during an ice storm. But still, it's probably been at least 25 years since I've heard WAPI around here under any circumstances.
 
Cyberdad,
WAPI is still there loud and clear; I live in the county
just to the east of it now.
They used to shut down the last Sunday of the month
(i.e. midnight Monday) for maintainance so you could
get KNX with no problem.
Since they now also run their shows on 99.5 don't
fool with 1070 much...this time of year WFLI gives
them fits near and after sunset...used to wonder if
'FLI was not going directional.
In the early mornings this time of year the 1070
in Indianapolis would blast in here along with the
R&B in Memphis,too.
They still run their original free standing twin tower
array which dates all the way back to the 1920's
when they started in Auburn...the 'API stood for
Auburn's old name,Alabama Polytechnic Institute.
 
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rtc said:
Cyberdad,
WAPI is still there loud and clear; I live in the county
just to the east of it now....
Click to expand...

Thanks for the update! So I guess my not hearing them when I drove through town was a one-off. I came through town in early afternoon, and did check 1070 a few times. So given that their programming is now on FM, I guess I can understand why getting the AM back up and running when something happens may not be the same priority as it would have been "back in the day". But I'm glad they're still around on the AM side. It would be kind of sad to see a big signal like theirs bite the dust.

Back in the 90s, I used to get into Birmingham every 2-3 months. Usually just passing through, although sometimes I'd spend the night. I had only one small customer in town. Most of my business was in Huntsville, Jackson (MS), and Atlanta. So B-ham was sort of in the middle of points A, B, and C. Also "D", if we count calls I'd sometimes make in and around Mobile. Anyway, the thing I remember about WAPI on all those car trips was that the day signal basically made it to the state line whether you were going east, west, or north on I-20 or I-65 respectively. About a hundred miles "give or take" depending on what direction you were headed. Not very impressive for 50kw non-directional, but it's pretty much all rugged terrain with lousy ground conductivity.
 
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Cyberdad,
IIRC (and Tom Servo knows for sure) WAPI was the first
station here to go to 50kw in 1958.But their moniker for
years "the voice of alabama" was a bit of an overstatement.

One reason may be their two antenna towers.They were
originally on 1140 or some such and had to move to 1070
in the great 1941 band reset.They had to add a cage-like
structure to the top of each tower to get the tx to load at
the new frequency.

During the tornado outbreak of April 27,2011 IIRC a
tornado tore thru Pratt City just south of them (it took
out 900's new tower) and about 40 feet of one of 'API's
towers fell off (rust from all those years since the 20's?).

Ham friend said they brought in a big crane,lifted it up
and welded it back on.

Both 850 and 690 got out much better...a distant cuz
said in the 60's he talked to 690 about an engineer's
job and after noticing their tx's voltage/ammerter he did
the math mentally and came out with something like
70kw!

The guy admitted it,said "we turn it back when 'they're'
in town"...of course 690 was a daytimer then.

My late father and I got a free tour around 1965 of 850
in it's original state.Was built in 1953,ran 20kw,had 4
towers to protect KOA in Denver and used WW2 surplus
PSP (pierced steel planking,"instant" runways) for the
ground system...that gave it a funny pattern with an
ice cycle looking lobe to the south all the way to Panama
City,FL which made the station very popular with young
beach goers.

The tx site was cut,watered and fertilized by a small herd
of cattle.

One odd thing was the tx building fluorescent lights;
they were never turned on,they fired on their own from
all that RF.
 
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Steve Green NEPA said:
1070 here in the day is semi-local 10K omni WKOK Sunbury PA.

At night* they are largely inaudible despite the insistence of three different sources who claim that the 1000-watt southwest tongue of a signal should put them atop the channel here.

As one might expect, SSS and nighttimes have been pretty good here for the logbook.

SSS's have provided WIBC Indianapolis, WSCP from upstate NY, and something called 'The Beach'. I've got that last one listed as 'tentative'. That means I don't count it as an official 'catch' until I find info to certify it to my beyond-all-doubt tastes :)

Nighttimes here most often had CHOK Ontario atop. Sometimes WIBC.
Does anyone know if CBA Moncton is still on the air? They should be a copper-pipe cinch if they still exist.

* The wife and I, because we got lost, wound up driving around the 'back' of WKOK's towers one night, northwest of their blinking array. The situation wasn't really dramatic or life-imperiling. But instead of a map, we actually used the WKOK signal to DF us back on the right roads. Wow -- the nulls and the audio of that sort of electromagnetic incest was music to this DXer's ears. The wife asked: 'This is a nearby station ?!?'
Click to expand...

Sadly, CBA went away back in 2008. I think I remember hearing in in the area north of Sunbury but not that well. It had a great signal here in Ottawa at night before going away, but after night time IBOC was allowed, sometimes WTIC would eat it up really bad.
 
@rtc. Thanks for the history lesson. Great Stuff!

I always knew 690 was the biggest daytime signal in town, but I wasn't aware that they sometimes used a littler "hamburger helper"...LOL. Explains why when I'd hear them here in Northern Illinois before signoff during their run as a daytimer, the signal would usually be quite good!

As for the B-ham 850, I used to listen occasionally during their run as an oldies station (WYDE..."wide 85"). Around the mid or late 90s, IIRC....and usually on runs to-from Atlanta. I didn't think their signal was particularly impressive in those days, and even wondered if they were actually running 50kw. Of course, ground conductivity was bad, and I was unclear whether there might be a null in the direction of I-20. R-L shows them making just about all the way to Atlanta, but I remember 850 being nearly spent by around Anniston.

I also may be "mis-remembering" after 20 or so years.
 
Cyberdad,
850 went to a country format in the fall of 1965 and went
to 50kw (which required a fifth tower) at the same time.

The new tx was a water cooled Collins and in the cold
months you could see the steam coming out of the tx
building.

Like all AM's it languished into the early part of this
century (IIRC) until Crawford bought it.
Good News was Crawford built a new tx building
with a modern tx,put in a new ground system and
overhauled the towers.
Bad news was right after that they screwed it
all up by adding IBOC...it sounds like a muffled
phone call now;the IBOC makes your ears bleed
and you have to be within sight of the towers to
decode it.

When they first tried IBOC,it was plus/minus 200 khz
off 850 with a weird beeping...this went on until the next
day when someone finally noticedšŸ˜Š.

Today they are back to 20kw to save money,have lost
listeners by the bucket fulls,but of course still run IBOC.
But Crawford always knows best...'cause they say so.

The idea with all companies seems to be to just keep the
AM's patched up with as little money as possible...some
of us think 'API's tx has components from every decade,
including the 1920's.

Rube Goldberg would be proud.šŸ˜Š
 
rtc said:
Cyberdad,

One reason may be their two antenna towers.They were
originally on 1140 or some such and had to move to 1070
in the great 1941 band reset.They had to add a cage-like
structure to the top of each tower to get the tx to load at
the new frequency.
Click to expand...

Yes, it was 1140. And the move to 1070 was one of the larger NARBA changes, most of which were under 50 kcs.

What they installed on the towers in 1941 is called "top loading" which creates an electrical height for a tower that is in excess of the physical height. It's a very common practice because it works so well. Properly done, the WAPI towers would "look" like true 90Ā° towers and any change in coverage due to the towers would have been more than made up by moving down on the dial.

Of course, WAPI was only 50 kw daytime, with the night power being 5 kw. Back when AM mattered, the WBRC-960 night signal was quite a bit better at covering the market than WAPI.


My late father and I got a free tour around 1965 of 850
in it's original state.Was built in 1953,ran 20kw,had 4
towers to protect KOA in Denver and used WW2 surplus
PSP (pierced steel planking,"instant" runways) for the
ground system...that gave it a funny pattern with an
ice cycle looking lobe to the south all the way to Panama
City,FL which made the station very popular with young
beach goers.
Click to expand...

In 1953 when WILD was built, it was 10 kw day and 1 kw night. 20 kw was not an authorized power level at that time.

The planking was likely tied into the ground system, possibly by welding of copper straps to it, but I do not think anything in the FCC rules permitted a ground system to be made only out of such materials.

I do not see any STA or application to run at 20 kw today. Crawford is one of the most diligent broadcasters insofar as technical operations are concerned, so it is unlikely they are just arbitrarily running lower power.
 
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