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AM DXers in Alaska

R

radioman148

Question for any AM DXers in Alaska:
Can you pick up any good DX from the lower 48 or Hawaii?
If so, can you get anything further than the west coast?
 
When I was stationed on Kodiak Island, my all-time record catch from lower 48 was WBZ-1030 Boston in June 1984. Surprisingly, many 50kw stations from Salt Lake City to the West Coast would come in at night. 1090 from Tijuana and 1100 from San Francisco were usually the strongest. Several Vancouver BC and Seattle/Portland area 50kwers would usually come in as well,...And Hawaiian stations would often show up. Could even get New Zealand on occasion..It all depended on the conditions; and of course, during long winter nights conditions could be OUTstanding (as long as there was no Aurora)
 
Salt Lake City is my farthest east station picked up from my home base in Anchorage, but heading west I've picked up some Japanese stations and possibly a Chinese or Taiwanese station. Heading south I regularly listen to San Fran stations since my sister lives there. Still no Hawaii but my setup is about as bad as it can get - when I finally move out of my metal-studded apartment near the radio towers standing a few hundred feet away my signal reception should improve dramatically.
 
PAJake said:
Salt Lake City is my farthest east station picked up from my home base in Anchorage, but heading west I've picked up some Japanese stations and possibly a Chinese or Taiwanese station. Heading south I regularly listen to San Fran stations since my sister lives there. Still no Hawaii but my setup is about as bad as it can get - when I finally move out of my metal-studded apartment near the radio towers standing a few hundred feet away my signal reception should improve dramatically.
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During the winter months do you get DX throughout all the dark hours?
Obviously you're not going to get it from places that are in daylight, but is all of Alaska & part of Canada available most hours of darkness?
 
I left Anchorage in 1999, but there's still a lot of empty AM dial in Alaska. Just a lot of noise and electrical interference in Anchorage makes the lower part of the dial a bit messy, day or night. And the aurora borealis gets in the way of reception in the winter, too.

Furthest I could get routinely on a tabletop Panasonic were WCCO Minneapolis and, perhaps, WHO Des Moines. OK, mayne I barely heard Chicago once.

Most of the AM signals are nighttime directionals from California, the Pac NW and Vancouver aimed away from the rest of the continent, and toward Alaska.

What I thought were a couple of signals from China or Taiwan turned out to be Chinese language programming on a couple of directionalizxed 50kw stations from Vancouver BC on AM1320 and 1470.

Early mornings seemed best for picking up Nome. KGO and KFBK were always there. Aimed due NNW to Alaska. Also AM1140 from Sacramento, if the Soldotna station wasn't also on 1140 making neither one listenable in Anchorage. Am1090 from Tijuana came in strong on the Glenn Hwy an hour or two east of Anchorage, even during twilight, with mariachi and ranchera music. Fun to listen to driving in the wilds of Alaska.

Now, go out on the coast of the Bering Sea and use a big stick and you will pick up a lot of 9 khz spaced stuff from Korea, Japan, etc. But the florescents and unshielded wiring will probably keep you from hearing it indoors, where it's safe and warm.

Never got signals from Lapland and the circumpolar north, however, unlike the DXers in northern Norway and Sweden who used to send in their DX reports to stations in Alaska in the winter. Nothing consistent from Russia, apart from shortwave.
 
My first and only visit to Alaska was in late May, 1995. I was all excited about AM DXing, thinking that I would be able to hear some of the 50 kW stations from the lower 48; e.g. 670, 720, and 780 from Chicago.

There was one thing I forgot, however; at that time of the year, it is daylight about 18 or 19 hours a day, and the remaining few hours are just twilight. Therefore, all propagation is essentially daytime! I never did hear a single station from the lower 48 (or anywhere else outside the state). I had a rental car with what I judged to be a pretty decent AM radio, and I was impressed with the fact that I was able to hear the two low-dial position 50 kW Anchorage stations pretty much anywhere I went, including well north of Fairbanks, in the "daytime". One of the two did better than the other; I think it may have been KENI (which may have had different calls back then; I seem to recall they had a country music format at that time). I also brought along my relatively large GE Superadio III on the trip.

I recall that some of the stations would broadcast messages to families living out in the "bush" several times during the day. I particularly remember hearing this on one of the Fairbanks stations (possibly KFAR). I took a picture of the KFAR transmitter site when I was up that way.

The most unusual DX I heard wasn't really even a broadcast station. I was driving along the George Parks highway on my way to Denali Park when I heard the unmistakable sound of a morse code ID. For many miles, this station came in faintly on the car radio, and then at last it picked up strength rather suddenly. I came around a curve to see a two tower array along the side of the road, with a "T" antenna suspended between the two towers. Sure enough, I had been listening to the 2nd harmonic of a non-directional beacon station. That harmonic sure went a long way!

While staying at Denali Park, I was introduced to a miner/trapper who lived in a cabin near Ferry, AK. He had no electrical power, and didn't have a good radio either. When I got back home I purchased another GE Superadio and sent it up to him by parcel post with several hundred feet of wire for use as an antenna. He had a 12V storage battery that he could charge by means of solar cells during the summer months and listen to radio and TV for a few hours a day.

My favorite thing about radio in Alaska was the almost complete lack of interference. All of the stations pretty much came through clearly all of the time, even if they were weak. This is similar to the experience I had in New Zealand when I visited there several times. It is wonderful to hear what AM sounds like when it is not polluted by thousands of stations crammed into the same tiny bit of spectrum. Of course, this was well before the advent of the great technical unimprovement known as IBOC, but that is a topic for another part of the board...

I'd love to go back to Alaska again someday. I really enjoyed my visit.
 
Careful when you visit. . . I came here for the first time in 2006 for vacation and moved here permanently less than a year later. Come to think of it, yesterday marked 2 years since I headed west and I still feel like I'm on vacation.
 
PAJake said:
Careful when you visit. . . I came here for the first time in 2006 for vacation and moved here permanently less than a year later. Come to think of it, yesterday marked 2 years since I headed west and I still feel like I'm on vacation.
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Where did you settle?
 
Left York PA and settled in Anchorage. I've lived in a small town (York) and a big city (Boston). Anch is a nice middle of the road, for now anyway.
 
PAJake said:
Left York PA and settled in Anchorage. I've lived in a small town (York) and a big city (Boston). Anch is a nice middle of the road, for now anyway.
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Do you work or are you retired?
If you can find work in a place you like then it's not really work.
 
Oh I'm quite a ways from retirement. I work a job I love, so I know what you're saying. Actually, I've been very fortunate to have never worked a job I didn't like. Spent a couple years in radio, then 12 years in TV, then a couple more in radio, and now I'm completely out of media altogether, working in the non-profit world, and loving that too. I'm blessed to have a good job in a great place to live, a rare double feature these days.
 
PAJake said:
Oh I'm quite a ways from retirement. I work a job I love, so I know what you're saying. Actually, I've been very fortunate to have never worked a job I didn't like. Spent a couple years in radio, then 12 years in TV, then a couple more in radio, and now I'm completely out of media altogether, working in the non-profit world, and loving that too. I'm blessed to have a good job in a great place to live, a rare double feature these days.
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Congratulations & good luck.
 
rjoc said:
When I was stationed on Kodiak Island, my all-time record catch from lower 48 was WBZ-1030 Boston in June 1984. Surprisingly, many 50kw stations from Salt Lake City to the West Coast would come in at night. 1090 from Tijuana and 1100 from San Francisco were usually the strongest. Several Vancouver BC and Seattle/Portland area 50kwers would usually come in as well,...And Hawaiian stations would often show up. Could even get New Zealand on occasion..It all depended on the conditions; and of course, during long winter nights conditions could be OUTstanding (as long as there was no Aurora)
Click to expand...

Can You easily DX Russian Stations in Alaska(Like Vladivostok)?
 
David67 said:
rjoc said:
When I was stationed on Kodiak Island, my all-time record catch from lower 48 was WBZ-1030 Boston in June 1984. Surprisingly, many 50kw stations from Salt Lake City to the West Coast would come in at night. 1090 from Tijuana and 1100 from San Francisco were usually the strongest. Several Vancouver BC and Seattle/Portland area 50kwers would usually come in as well,...And Hawaiian stations would often show up. Could even get New Zealand on occasion..It all depended on the conditions; and of course, during long winter nights conditions could be OUTstanding (as long as there was no Aurora)
Click to expand...

Can You easily DX Russian Stations in Alaska(Like Vladivostok)?
Click to expand...

I've heard that you can and also Japan & Korea, but hopefully someone there will let us know more.
 
Actually, you can't. There weren't any high power AM stations on the Russian coast when I lived there in the early 1980s and later 1990s. I tried. I haven't been back since late 1999, but I doubt that it's changed with most of the world using FM now for most of their signals.

In the Soviet days, they used shortwave and carrier-current stations for the smaller cities in Siberia (not sure if they had radio in the gulags!), and once in a rare while you might get something from somewhere like Anadyr on AM1000 or so (not sure of the 9kHz spacing on that one). If you use a very powerful antenna gain setup, depending where you are in the state and what your local interference issues are, you might hear some of the big AMs from Japan, China, Korea, etc. But localized interference, from unshielded florescent lighting in most of the rural houses to the dial smatter from the two in-town 50kwers in Anchorage will jam out most DXing. Also, the short twilight of summer (doesn't get dark for a couple of months) and the way the northern lights tend to silence the dial (even when you can't view them) -- it's a lot of work to get anything more than the big California, Oregon, Tijuana and Vancouver BC stations that are directionalized to the NW at night, toward Alaska. The most reliable strong signals were mornings on shortwave from New Zealand and Australia, and late night for KGO, KFBK and the Chinese language AM 1320 (and maybe the revised Punjabi AM1200) from Vancouver. AM1140 from Sacramento would also have been strong, but it fought with a local station on 1140 on the Kenai Peninsula, and AM 690 and 1090 from Tijuana usually made it to Alaska over the closer 50kw signals from Vancouver and Seattle. The rest (as monitored in Anchorage) was occasional skip of other 10kw and 50kw Alaska AM stations from Nome, Barrow, Dillingham and Sand Point, and maybe Bethel if you get out of town, mostly in the dark of the winter morning. Never any FM skip. Too far away from the rest of the world, and a surprisingly full FM dial in Anchorage.
 
I've heard from some people in Alaska that you can get the far east periodically on AM. As you pointed out noise is a problem and you better try in the winter when there's plenty of darkness and no aurora. Also I've been told that Hawaii occasionally comes in as well.
 
On very rare occasions here in Anchorage I've picked up what seems to be an Asian language station on 774, which would correspond to an NHK affiliate in Akita, Japan. However, since I don't speak Japanese I can't confirm what I'm hearing.
 
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