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Trashed AM Frequency of the week: 700

cyberdad

cyberdad

Well....maybe we should just make a rotating weekly thread out of it!

I tuned to 700 about 90 minutes before sunrise this morning, and there was WLW getting trashed. "The Big One" was mixing with pop music in English and Spanish from "A little one" (supposedly). In between songs, there were also "this station is for rent" announcements followed by mentions of Dallas and a 972 area code phone number.

R-L shows it as KHSE, but I'm not sure if those are the current call letters. R-L also shows them at 920 watts nights with a major null in my direction. Day pattern depicts a large lobe pointed right at me, but still only 1500 watts. Yet null WLW, and the Texas station was perfectly listenable....and almost equal strength.

I got the impression that new management has taken over an existing facility, setting up shop, and neglecting to power down. Or maybe even applying a little "hamburger helper"!

Has anyone else heard this or know what's going on?
 
cyberdad said:
Well....maybe we should just make a rotating weekly thread out of it!

I tuned to 700 about 90 minutes before sunrise this morning, and there was WLW getting trashed. "The Big One" was mixing with pop music in English and Spanish from "A little one" (supposedly). In between songs, there were also "this station is for rent" announcements followed by mentions of Dallas and a 972 area code phone number.

R-L shows it as KHSE, but I'm not sure if those are the current call letters. R-L also shows them at 920 watts nights with a major null in my direction. Day pattern depicts a large lobe pointed right at me, but still only 1500 watts. Yet null WLW, and the Texas station was perfectly listenable....and almost equal strength.

I got the impression that new management has taken over an existing facility, setting up shop, and neglecting to power down. Or maybe even applying a little "hamburger helper"!

Has anyone else heard this or know what's going on?
Click to expand...

The FCC grants nonsensical licenses, somebody can make a few bucks a month by brokering the station. Some fool wants to hear themselves on the radio, even if nobody listens. So you get trash like this all over the country. Makes both AM and FM bands almost useless. when it is the overwhelming way stations are run. Here in Houston KSEV jams WLW, which used to be a daytime regular catch in the winter months.
 
Here in central Ohio, we are too close to Cincinnati to hear anything substantial on 700 besides WLW. Even when WLW went off the air overnight a few years ago for some technical work, nothing else came in.
The only time I ever heard another signal on 700 around here was six or seven years ago. One night around this time of year, I think in 2010, an unidentified station was wreaking havoc with WLW around critical hours. I couldn't ID the other station or tell what they were broadcasting, but the co-channel interference was enough to make WLW next to impossible to listen to.
When I lived in suburban Houston, I was far enough south of KSEV and out of their main nighttime lobe that most nights, I could hear both stations with a simple turn of the radio.
 
Point taken, Bruce. But I still can't understand how a 1600-watt (assuming day power/pattern) pipsqueak from Texas can render a blowtorch much closer to me useless. WLW is normally one of the stronger skywave signals here, and I'm well beyond their convergence zone.
aAnd it's not just this that the FCC is allowing to happen. Last week it was "CK-750" from Saskatchewan ripping WSB to shreds.

Maybe nobody cares any more. After all, we now have 50kw stations branding themselves with their translators' frequencies.
 
I saw some nice pics of northern lights from upper Michigan from last night, so that would likely be the reason you're getting KHSE and no WLW. That happens where I live
 
gr8oldies said:
I saw some nice pics of northern lights from upper Michigan from last night, so that would likely be the reason you're getting KHSE and no WLW. That happens where I live
Click to expand...

That is a good and likely explanation.

From NE Ohio, I had numerous occasions to find stations like WLW, WHAS and KMOX almost totally gone, while stations in Colombia and Venezuela were dominant on the channels, and totally readable with little fading.
 
rbrucecarter5 said:
The FCC grants nonsensical licenses, somebody can make a few bucks a month by brokering the station. Some fool wants to hear themselves on the radio, even if nobody listens. So you get trash like this all over the country. Makes both AM and FM bands almost useless. when it is the overwhelming way stations are run. Here in Houston KSEV jams WLW, which used to be a daytime regular catch in the winter months.
Click to expand...

Daytime, Class A stations are protected this way:

Co-channel Stations use a 20:1 Ratio which says that our 0.025 mV/m contour cannot
overlap their 0.5 mV/m contour and that their 0.025 mV/m contour cannot overlap our 0.5 mV/m contour

And for Class A Co-channel Stations our 0.005 mV/m contour cannot overlap their 0.1 mV/m contour

Nights: Site to Site RSS Calculation to all Co-channel Stations in Region II
Protection to Class A Contours: 0.5 mV/m 50% Skywave Contour for Co-channel Stations

So there is no protection for WLW in the Houston area, day or night per the rules. The FCC is a technical, not an economic gatekeeper. If an application meets the technical standards, it can be licensed.
 
Here in the Seattle metro 700 is routinely 'trashed' by 710 splatter. That said, in the late 80's I think it was, I logged WLW once.
 
I've logged WLW only once as well. 700 is a mess of KXLX WA, KALL UT, and CJLI AB. Towards the south it's a mix of KGRV OR and KMBX CA. If WLW was at 500KW like they were in the late 1930s, they would be as strong as KGO most nights. But that's illegal nowadays.
 
I was using a longwire and my old DX-160 (which are great MW DX machines). Need to pull that baby out of the closet perhaps. Might have been a short KIRO silent period back then, or maybe not. So long ago I can't really remember it.

Here (as you're probably aware) it's mostly KGRV/CJLI and often KXLX pokes through the splatter. I've heard KALL maybe once, as an echo. In Chelan on my boombox in 2011 I heard KXLX and KALL clearly. Eastern Washington is a great DX location.
 
DavidEduardo said:


Daytime, Class A stations are protected this way:

Co-channel Stations use a 20:1 Ratio which says that our 0.025 mV/m contour cannot
overlap their 0.5 mV/m contour and that their 0.025 mV/m contour cannot overlap our 0.5 mV/m contour

And for Class A Co-channel Stations our 0.005 mV/m contour cannot overlap their 0.1 mV/m contour

Nights: Site to Site RSS Calculation to all Co-channel Stations in Region II
Protection to Class A Contours: 0.5 mV/m 50% Skywave Contour for Co-channel Stations

So there is no protection for WLW in the Houston area, day or night per the rules. The FCC is a technical, not an economic gatekeeper. If an application meets the technical standards, it can be licensed.
Click to expand...

AM and FM comments below ----

My point is - if I were going to put a new station on the air, I would look for a blank frequency. Not one that is frequently occupied by a distant, but powerful signal. AM is not dominated by capture ratio. If WLW intrudes daytime, it can and will mix with KSEV and be heard underneath. Even on FM, it is not advisable to put a signal on a frequency with a nearby powerhouse. Even if it is weak - a bit of atmospherics and you are torn shreds on AM or blanked out on FM by a more distant, but powerful signal. Ask the folks at Cypress radio - who had to change frequencies. Even their new frequency gets severe interference by a monster 150 miles away fairly often. It makes those contour maps useless, especially in areas like Florida where the afternoon rainstorms open up the entire FM band and every station on the Peninsula comes in like a local. Given the frequency of rain in Florida, contour maps are not the norm. Sea breeze thunderstorm skip is. As you pointed out, auroras throw AM propagation maps out the window - and we are approaching or at a solar max right now. I asked an Alaskan truck driver what the effect of nighttime skywave is in the far North. There is none - auroras.
 
1570 in the Western United States might be a good example of a frequency that everyone avoided.XERF at 250 kilowatts probably caused too much Havoc during daytime critical hours. And with less population there were better frequencies available
 
joebtsflk1 said:
1570 in the Western United States might be a good example of a frequency that everyone avoided.XERF at 250 kilowatts probably caused too much Havoc during daytime critical hours. And with less population there were better frequencies available
Click to expand...

The issue is, in part, the treaty conditions on Mexican clear channels. The treaty, from what I remember from the last time I read it (and the rules currently in force through the Comisión Mixta), requires US stations to protect the entire extent of the Mexican border, from the Gulf to the Pacific. So in the border states, one could not put a station on that would interfere with a theoretical full power facility located at the closest point on the border.

It took considerable work to get changes made to the agreement to even allow low power night operation on the Mexican clears.
 
gr8oldies said:
XERF was entitled to protection during the daytime, even though it didn't operate during most daytime hours.
Click to expand...

That's 'cause the treaties and agreements protect the Mexican border, not individual stations.
 
Schlep82 said:
: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNsxjxL8gVw

Good idea for "Trashed AM Frequency of the week" and the radio station 700 WLW!
Click to expand...

I was just being sarcastic with that thread title. Not really thinking of launching a new series. It just seemed to me that this sort of stuff seems to be happening more often than it used to.

Of course that doesn't automatically assume that there are now more "cheaters" out there than before, although that's probably true to at least a certain degree. In the case of what I ran into with WLW, the auroral conditions probably explain it. I didn't notice that to be the case on the morning in question, but I also didn't spend much time elsewhere on the band once I heard what was happening on 700.

So maybe "Trashed Frequency of the Week" might be a good idea, after all. Even if we don't hold strictly to the "week" part of it. My suggestion would be that we keep it strictly....or at least "mostly"...to stations/channels getting "trashed" that probably shouldn't be.

But what do you guys think? I'm happy to be the one keeping up the current "frequency of the week" opening posts by channel. But how about if we do a "trashed" series, we all take turns posting when we hear something that fits. Again, in my view, it doesn't have to be weekly. We can simply call it "Trashed Frequency: XXXkhz (or XXXmhz, if we go FM) Just start a thread if/when you hear something. At minimum, we can try to figure out what's going on, and/or take it as a DX opportunity.

What do you think?
 
rbrucecarter5 said:
I am good with it. In fact I would like to submit 850 for consideration.
Click to expand...

I'll second that -- in fact, I was thinking of 850 when I saw this thread. KOA, usually a blowtorch in my area, is sometimes just absent, and instead I hear mostly religious/gospel programming. But I'm not sure what it's being trashed by. It can't be KICY Nome, AK, which I've dreamed of catching. I suspect the 850 from Duluth, MN, which is 50k days but limited to 14k critical hours. I'm hearing this other signal post-critical hours. I would also question the 850 from St. Louis, although it too is supposed to be a purely daytime operation. I'm not the least bit interested in the programming I hear on this other 850, so I haven't hung around to hear what the station(s) is/are.

830 has been another one. WCCO should be fairly loud and clear most of the time in my area but I often hear WFNO Norco, LA.

Also, on 880, usually occupied by WCBS (though not always), I often hear KRVN Lexington, NE, which shouldn't be showing up either. CKLQ is sometimes in the mix, but I seldom hear it these days.

1010 is hash much of the time. It used to be mostly CFRB, but it's a struggle to hear that signal.

1030 is another one -- it should be WBZ all the time -- but I often hear other stuff and I'm not sure what I'm hearing. Most often, probably just a jumble.

I haven't heard a clear KRLD in years on 1080.

1160 -- seldom if ever hear KSL and WYLL is there infrequently; generally these days it's trashed by the supposedly 230 watts of KCTO from outside Kansas City. I'm about 275 miles from Kansas City.

1200 is another one -- a lot going on there (although usually it's WRTO Chicago) where WOAI used to be uncontested.

I'm sure I could go on.
 
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