AM Frequency of the Week: 1060

[ZantennaG1]

Funny. We did that at Emmis' Radio 10 in Buenos Aires, 100 kw on 710. A quarter wave parasitic tower was put in the NW corner of the land, pushing the signal slightly more towards downtown. That was what it took to have a noise-free building penetrating signal everywhere in the metro. We lost some coverage in the direction of the null effect, but we wanted Bs. As. and not Paraguay.

In that market, the 50 kw stations just were not strong enough to avoid urban noise... 20 years ago!

How far away from Downtown Buenos Aires was the transmitter?

 

[TomásEstefan]

Funny. We did that at Emmis' Radio 10 in Buenos Aires, 100 kw on 710. A quarter wave parasitic tower was put in the NW corner of the land, pushing the signal slightly more towards downtown. That was what it took to have a noise-free building penetrating signal everywhere in the metro. We lost some coverage in the direction of the null effect, but we wanted Bs. As. and not Paraguay.

In that market, the 50 kw stations just were not strong enough to avoid urban noise... 20 years ago!

Was that 100 kw before or after the additional tower, because your ERP would just about have doubled?

 

[davideduardo]

Was that 100 kw before or after the additional tower, because your ERP would just about have doubled?

100 kw into the active tower. We calculated the lobe that hit the Obelisk at about 130 kw. I was not there when it was designed, so I don't know at what wavelength multiple the small mast was, but I´m guessing that it was around 0.5 to 0.6 wavelengths.

 

[davideduardo]

How far away from Downtown Buenos Aires was the transmitter?

62 km from the transmitter to the Obelisk. Bs. As. is a huge city, truly about 21 million with the peripheral cities in the Province and not the "Big" city itself. The transmitter is on leased land at the edge of the Campo de Mayo Military Base, infamous for the "desaparecidos" during the military government.

 

[Steve Green NEPA]

@ Gregg : Correct, sir, about KYW's signal. When I worked in Philly I was driving north on 'The Boulevard' -- Route 1 -- with some SSS daylight to spare. While I was idly tuning around the analog radio in the Nova , still very much in Philly proper, WBZ 1030 was so loud that I thought it was KYW. KYW was steady, but much weaker.
This is KYW's 24-hour pattern. We live between the circles of Hazleton and Pottsville.
KYW-AM Radio Station Coverage Map

One morning with the sun already up, date unk (probably the mid-90's). I turned on the bedside table-radio Zenith, normally set to KYW, and heard traffic and weather. Only the roads had strange names. For some reason, WBIS from Natick / Boston was in the clear. KYW came in later as the daylight got brighter. WBIS/WBOM might've been on their CH pattern.

On vacation in Lady Lake Florida one March evening, I was in a beach chair on the Folks' front lawn with a martini and the GE Superadio 2. 'Lemme try to get New Orleans here,' I figured. The wife comes out, hears the 'KYW, news radio, ten-sixty' jingle, and grumbles, 'You came all the way down here with that nice radio just to hear THEM?!?
So Gregg, those unlikely places where KYW comes in are interesting. I'd heard they were once heard in Hawaii. Dunno which of the islands. The curvature of the world globe probabkly explains that.

 

[jim-satx]

A few of us have witnessed mid-day skywave in Spring and Autumn. Because, for the last 60 years or so most channels are locally blocked, there are not many reports of this in the last half-century.

But in around 1961, at just after noon, EST, in an eastern suburb of Cleveland, I got 4VEH from Cap Haitien, Haiti on 1035 with full readability. Because 1035 is a split frequency, and both KDKA and WBZ were quite a ways away, there was no sideband interference on my HQ-180.

I still wonder why I was even looking for DX in that part of the band at noon. I think it was a teacher's day at school and I was just looking for overlooked stations. I tried from the Bermuda station on 1235, but it was not there, even though it had a much greater salt water path.

The most bizarre was what I witnessed many times in Puerto Rico... at perhaps 3 PM, three hours from sunset, I'd get a variety of stations from places like Libya and Morocco and several of the western sub-Saharan nations on my car radio in San Juan. The path included at least three hours of daylight, making the reception and its extreme clarity quite interesting.

My most noteworthy daytime skywave was hearing 730 XEX in Mexico City at 702 miles around 11 a.m. CST on my car radio back in January 2019. I've never heard anything via mid-day skywave that low on the AM band before or since.