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1400 : Search for your most unheard station?

Steve Green NEPA

Steve Green NEPA

The good thing about 1400 is that it now sounds, by default, like a hundred other crowded AM frequencies at night.

The bad thing is that the other frequencies, well, do sound the same lately.

But since 1400 has indeed remained a form of constant -- a given -- from back in the days when we were used to it plus other GY's sounding like that.

Here in NE PA, a weak WEST from Easton, 45 miles east, is the daytime regular atop a grumbling, grumpy 1400 midday soup. I've heard a few others actually ID, most of them at night.

So the most-wanted here is WICK Scranton. That's primarily because they were the most stubborn, and naturally the last, of all the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre GYers. The two others were almost all-night pests back in Queens .... WBRE 1340, WBAX 1240. Not WICK, though.

How well are you folks doing in quest of a new log on this traditional DXing minefield?
 
Probably the #1 most wanted graveyarder for me, I've searched for years and have never heard them. I especially try for them during Friday night HS football. Not there.

It's KODI Cody WY.
 
I can't prove it, but the reasons all the frequencies sound almost as bad as Class IVs/Cs is that many former Class IIs and IIIs are staying on Day facilities. PSSA Nondirectional Class D operations make this situation much worse. Their excuse is that people can't hear their station otherwise, but they make it so you can't hear the legacy stations operating legally either. In Canada, one of the excuses for stations staying on higher power/nondirectional/Day-DA and the authorities look the other way, is IBOC adjacent channel interference from US stations. I wish the AMs would turn off their IBOC, at least at Night. We have at least a half dozen DAY signals that are no longer listenable, and many at Night.

Just ONE typical Class D 5000 watt Day, 29 watt Night station on Day power within a few hundred miles raises the NIF of legacy Class III-As and III-Bs to NIF contours as high or higher than Class IVs/C. And it's more annoying because you can hear the audio instead of "near" white noise in the background like Class IVs/Cs.
 
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So sad...but, so true.
One "good thing" from last week's earthquake is that 1540, 1550 and 1560 may be a bit clearer now. KMRI lost it's tower, so with it went the 10 KW (vs 340 watts, licensed) power they were running on 1550, as well as the 400% modulation they've been running.
Anybody noticed a difference?
 
kenglish said:
So sad...but, so true.
One "good thing" from last week's earthquake is that 1540, 1550 and 1560 may be a bit clearer now. KMRI lost it's tower, so with it went the 10 KW (vs 340 watts, licensed) power they were running on 1550, as well as the 400% modulation they've been running.
Anybody noticed a difference?
Click to expand...

An AM, unlike FM, can not really do 400% modulation. At 100% negative peaks there is carrier suppression. A little bit just creates distortion, but a lot suppresses the carrier too far. But as a broadcast engineer, I think you know that.

Often excessive processing is thought to be over-modulation, but it is just a station trying to sound too loud by cutting the dynamic range and creating square waves.

FM, on the other hand, has an arbitrary 100%. It is set at +/- 75 kHz. In one station I worked at, we found that we could run up to 133% with no problem. Beyond that, the limit was the bandwidth of FM receivers and going to 150% or more went beyond many radio's bandwith and sounded awful. So we stuck with 125%, as going beyond would reduce our earlier Optimod's stereo injection down too low.
 
1400 is our local home of WGAP, Maryville (Murval), TN. I'm going to put WBAT, Marion, IN as my most wanted on this frequency.

There are former clears, like 1570, just stuffed with former daytimers that got 250 night watts. I've worked at 2 of them.
 
1400 is WLTA here out of Alpharetta GA. (just north of Atlanta) and is a 1KW daytimer. Its a Salem O&O and simulcasts with WNIV (970).
 
I was noting how KMRI looks on the Northern Utah SDR.
It's distortion byproducts were showing up across three channels, and appeared to be wider than KSL and it's IBOC sidebands..
On the car radio, their audio distortion was unbearable, and they intermod with other stations as you drive around.
If they are lucky, maybe their transmitter will be damaged just enough to warrant a visit from a factory engineer who can tweak it up nicely.
 
I think KMRI is still putting out 10,000 watts of daytime power all night long.
 
crainbebo said:
I think KMRI is still putting out 10,000 watts of daytime power all night long.
Click to expand...

They were, right up until the earthquake.
I heard an English station on 1550 this morning. It was pretty strong. At first, I thought they were back, on a wire antenna.
 
I hadn't really thought much about a target on 1400. Normally daytime, it's a fairly respectable signal from WRJN in Racine, WI. WRJN disappears into the slop at night, and from time to time produces a nice DX catch. But if you were to put a gun to my head and asked me to pick one....or two....it might go like this.

WBIZ, Eau Claire, WI. I lied in the area briefly in the early 1970s and it was a nice little top 40 station. simulcast on a 50kw FM from a TV tower. (Now what they have is a translator). They had a short tower, which I presume they're still using. They didn't get out very well, and the poor ground conductivity in the area.

KAYS in Hays, Kansas has the opposite type of ground conductivity. Deep black prairie soil, which produces a signal that's downright impressive. The resultant day signal....from my own experience....is listenable for about 100 miles in each direction on I-70.
 
kenglish said:
They were, right up until the earthquake.
I heard an English station on 1550 this morning. It was pretty strong. At first, I thought they were back, on a wire antenna.
Click to expand...

KMRI didn't always ..erm, cheat every night.. but was a regular occurance

KWRN 1550 in Victorville, CA outside San Bernardino is what you may be hearing instead of KMRI
 
I will take whatever 1400 I can get my hands on.. I've heard KCOW, KBRB, KFTM and KRLN... so anything 250+ away, I'll gladly take, I'm not picky.
 
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