Remember when radio was like magic

[Harvey_Dogg]

You pulled signals out of thin air from hundreds or thousands of miles away. KFI from LA could be heard most late nights in Indiana. All you had to do was null out CMQ from Cuba. Trying for all 50 States was fun.
With a 10 element beam at 50 feet above ground, I could hear 8 states on FM from Indianapolis just about every night.

 

[landtuna]

And I had just about as much fun with a pair of plastic earphones and my home made crystal set.

 

[davideduardo]

You pulled signals out of thin air from hundreds or thousands of miles away. KFI from LA could be heard most late nights in Indiana. All you had to do was null out CMQ from Cuba. Trying for all 50 States was fun.
With a 10 element beam at 50 feet above ground, I could hear 8 states on FM from Indianapolis just about every night.

Today, folks wish for something better than static, fading and low-quality audio.

You should be saying, "KFI could be heard some nights in the winter in Indiana when the conditions were good. In the summer and even late Spring, it was usually difficult or very "DX quality" and it was seldom armchair listening quality."

After the early to mi-60's, trying to get all states was next to impossible. It took me 5 years between 1958 and 1963 to get all states from Ohio, and the Alaska catch was never repeated over that 60 month period.

 

[Harvey_Dogg]

I never got all 50 states on AM. Some were on FM or TV instead. G98 and Zip
106 from Cleveland could be heard in Indy on my JVC tuner often. CJOM, CBE, and CKLW on FM were regulars too. I heard Maine and New Mexico on FM. KOTA Channel 3 from Rapid City, South Dakota came in once.
I did most of my DXing back when I was single. Reason, the static.

 

[KeithE4]

You pulled signals out of thin air from hundreds or thousands of miles away. KFI from LA could be heard most late nights in Indiana. All you had to do was null out CMQ from Cuba. Trying for all 50 States was fun.

Maybe in some parts of Indiana, but where I grew up (Bloomington) Cuba overloaded 640. KFI was in no way a regular, although I did hear it on occasion. Same with KNX. WIBC beamed away from Bloomington at night, but stations in Madison and Knoxville were more regular.

With a 10 element beam at 50 feet above ground, I could hear 8 states on FM from Indianapolis just about every night.

How many people used that large an antenna for FM, especially when Indy was always a good FM market? Now, for TV, one needed a good sized antenna just to get Channels 8 and 13 in Bloomington. I'd hate to think how bad DTV reception must be now. Hilly country, lots of trees, and UHF reception do not mix.

 

[Harvey_Dogg]

The Voice of Cuba CMQ was always on top of 640. You needed to stay up till midnight. Then turn the AM antenna so Cuba wasn't there. Then you could almost always hear KFI. KNX was harder to get. CHOK 1070 from Sarnia was usually on top. IN fact, CHOK would fight it out with WIBC in Brownsburg an Indy suburb. However, I could hear WIBC quite well in Washington, DC at night.

 

[tvnut]

Here in the southwest suburbs of Chicago, the KFI/CMQ null selection was also in effect, and almost every night I tried. Even in summer, two hours after Los Angeles sunset, turn the old Radio Shack Patrolman 6 the correct way and there was KFI, building in strength as the night went on, but there well enough from the start to catch the Dodgers called by Vin Scully, or the Kings called by Jiggs McDonald in the winter – the whole game – and even the Lakers with Chick Hearn for a couple of years.

I didn't bother much with KFI after the 1974 baseball season, as, I have since learned, new owner Cox didn't think sports was a fit for KFI and dropped the local teams. But even KNX came in occasionally in those years when other 1070 inhabitants were AWOL for a bit.

Others had more trouble, but I seemed to be in the right spot with a pretty good radio.

 

[davideduardo]

The Voice of Cuba CMQ was always on top of 640. You needed to stay up till midnight. Then turn the AM antenna so Cuba wasn't there. Then you could almost always hear KFI. KNX was harder to get. CHOK 1070 from Sarnia was usually on top. IN fact, CHOK would fight it out with WIBC in Brownsburg an Indy suburb. However, I could hear WIBC quite well in Washington, DC at night.

Since shortly after the Revolution, CMQ has been "Radio Progreso" and one of the main national networks. CMQ, which was formerly known just by its call letters, had been the leading radio network in free Cuba under owner Goar Mestre. In the early 50's, Mestre built a TV net, which also became the leader in its field.

Radio Rebelde, Radio Progreso and Radio Reloj are the main national webs in Cuba, with other secondary nets like Enciclopedia (which has mostly migrated to FM) and regional sets of stations being less important.

 

[radioman148]

Here in the southwest suburbs of Chicago, the KFI/CMQ null selection was also in effect, and almost every night I tried. Even in summer, two hours after Los Angeles sunset, turn the old Radio Shack Patrolman 6 the correct way and there was KFI, building in strength as the night went on, but there well enough from the start to catch the Dodgers called by Vin Scully, or the Kings called by Jiggs McDonald in the winter – the whole game – and even the Lakers with Chick Hearn for a couple of years.

I didn't bother much with KFI after the 1974 baseball season, as, I have since learned, new owner Cox didn't think sports was a fit for KFI and dropped the local teams. But even KNX came in occasionally in those years when other 1070 inhabitants were AWOL for a bit.

Others had more trouble, but I seemed to be in the right spot with a pretty good radio.

In the Chicago area I could usually null CMQ enough to get a decent signal of KFI especially as the night progressed.
KNX was harder and where I lived I could only get KNBR early Monday mornings when local WMAQ signed off.

 

[boombox4]

The one thing I always liked about DXing was back then it was the only way to get the feel of another city's culture. And with the propagation, you could 'hear' the distance. The signals truly sounded as if they were coming from a long distance away.

 

[tvnut]

In the Chicago area I could usually null CMQ enough to get a decent signal of KFI especially as the night progressed.
KNX was harder and where I lived I could only get KNBR early Monday mornings when local WMAQ signed off.

So true about KNBR. On my radio, and with (I believe) 15 kHz bandwidth for stations there, there was no shot at KNBR, and barely one for WNBC with WMAQ's booming signal. Today, with 10.2 kHz bandwidth, I have no trouble with the crowd on 680 and am listening to WFAN right now.

 

[Schroedingers Cat]

For a lot of people, tuning indicators like the "Magic Eye Tubes" were fascinating. I used a 1938 Model Westinghouse Table Radio with a 6U5 tube. The AM BC section went up to 1720 kHz, covering the old Police Band referred to in the skit about "Wonderful WINO" by George Carlin. The SW went from just below 6 MHz to just above 18 MHz.

Here's a link about various Tuning Eye and VU indicators.

InMotion Hosting

The radio on The Waltons has a hole with a green glow, but if you look closely, there is no tube in there.

 

[Schroedingers Cat]

I heard KNX even before I heard KFI, in SE Michigan, when CHOK had signed off, on a Sony 6R-11 TRF set. Unlike previous transistor radios I had, it was extremely sensitive. I could get WCFL in the Daytime on it, with a signal around 50 uV/m in my area.

 

[radioman148]

For a lot of people, tuning indicators like the "Magic Eye Tubes" were fascinating. I used a 1938 Model Westinghouse Table Radio with a 6U5 tube. The AM BC section went up to 1720 kHz, covering the old Police Band referred to in the skit about "Wonderful WINO" by George Carlin. The SW went from just below 6 MHz to just above 18 MHz.

Here's a link about various Tuning Eye and VU indicators.

InMotion Hosting

The radio on The Waltons has a hole with a green glow, but if you look closely, there is no tube in there.

I had one of those old VU indicators on an old Webcor tape recorder from the 50s.

 

[MichaelTheZ]

I come from a little different perspective, being a "young" 48 year old, and not doing much AM radio listening between my teenage years in California and the last 2 years in Chicago. Definitely DXing was much easier growing up... I picked up WHO, WBBM, WCCO, and some other stations of similar distance, while here I haven't penetrated west of KOA in Denver despite now having logged over 300 stations.

But really the big difference for me is the programming... there were many independent stations back then, and the chains were things like the "Interstate Radio Network" which would play relatively pleasant country music you could listen to while waiting for an ID. Nowadays the vast majority of stations are one of several specific formats, and stations of a given format are pretty much indistinguishable. A station from Illinois is pretty much the same as a station from Florida or a station from Oregon. I appreciate what he does for the community, but by now I've probably heard Dave Ramsey's baby steps several hundred times

 

[Schroedingers Cat]

In SE Michigan, I managed to get up an Archer/Antennacraft FM-10 on a rotator at about 30 feet before the Docket 80-90 resulting stations started to come on in the mid 1980s. Some of the regulars 200-250 miles away were WMBI 90.1, WFMR 96.5, WLPX 97.3, WJML 98.9, and WIXX 101.1. WIXX 101.1 was in a direction which nulled WRIF 101.1. I'm sure you know the stations I'm talking about, regardless of the call letters I used, and with the editing time having reverted to five minutes, I don't have time to look them up.

 

[Theater of My Mind]

Today, folks wish for something better than static, fading and low-quality audio.

Yes. but in the pre-internet era the music discovery and connection to the outside world outweighed the poor quality of the audio.

The one thing I always liked about DXing was back then it was the only way to get the feel of another city's culture. And with the propagation, you could 'hear' the distance. The signals truly sounded as if they were coming from a long distance away.

Again it was about connecting to the outside word, and it was especially important for people living in smaller towns and rural areas. The funny thing is that when I was growing up I thought some of the biggest cities in the U.S. were places like Buffalo and Albany, NY, Fort Wayne, IN and Wheeling WV.

 

[CTListener]

Yes. but in the pre-internet era the music discovery and connection to the outside world outweighed the poor quality of the audio.


Again it was about connecting to the outside word, and it was especially important for people living in smaller towns and rural areas. The funny thing is that when I was growing up I thought some of the biggest cities in the U.S. were places like Buffalo and Albany, NY, Fort Wayne, IN and Wheeling WV.

Shortwave listeners, however, were experts on the major -- usually the capital -- cities of dozens of countries. Except for the Netherlands, where modest Hilversum was the only place that mattered.

 

[Harvey_Dogg]

I don't know how many days I listened to noise to get that prize catch on 1580 from Arizona. But, I caught KTUF just long enough to hear a weather forecast.
DXing was kind of like fishing. That was part of the magic.

 

[Harvey_Dogg]

A 10 element beam put me in a different league than from trying to DX with an FM whip antenna. I could hear a 10 watt station more than 100 miles away. I could catch 3,000 watts at 150 miles, 50,000 at 300 miles, and just about any Cass C 100,000 watt station within 400 miles. Tropospheric ducting is very common in Indiana. So, I was able to DX most evenings, nights, and mornings.
Recently I hooked up my old DX gear to see what I could get. My stepson came into the room and asked if my equipment was broken. What's all that static?