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Claire FM

D

dxer720

Here in Lake Geneva, WI, I was dialing around the FM band just past 4pm CDT & came upon a station on 95.9, fading in & out like an E-skip catch, so I listened.

I was using a Tecsun PL-390 on a C. Crane FM Reflect antenna aimed east/west, with a 20 dB Archer inline signal amplifier.

I made a short video of the radio display with audio, of course. I'll post to youtube when I get the chance.

What I could understand was very spotty, (due to signal) but I caught bits of news, (a bomber arrest for Marrakesh bombing, a house fire in Shannon & investigating a French plane crash last year) sports (racing & golf) & weather, (didn't catch many locations) plus death notices...All had some sort of English-type of accent. Then they went into a music program Later, they gave a web address for more info on the obituaries, (claire.fm) but it goes nowhere. I can also find no station calling itself Claire FM in the Radio Locator listings. I know these are not perfect, but I thought I'd try.

The signal only lasted a few minutes of the in/out then it was gone forever. I've stayed on the frequency for about an hour & it hasn't returned. The band didn't act like an E-skip opening. There were no other stations on that frequency, except Joliet, IL's WERV.

I have no idea what this station is.

Any help would be appreciated.
 
I spent some time last month vacationing in the west of Ireland, and listened to Clare FM while I was there.

The programming matches what you heard, and Clare FM does have a transmitter at Woodcock Hill on 95.9.

But having said that: the likelihood that you had transatlantic E-skip from that transmitter is somewhere between nil and absolute zero, especially on an indoor antenna with a noisy amplifier attached.

There are no confirmed reports of Ireland-to-US FM reception, and only a tiny handful in the opposite direction...and those involved 100 kW transmitters on the US end (Clare FM at Woodcock Hill uses only a few hundred watts) and very large outdoor antennas at the receive site in Scotland. The distances involved were shorter, too, by nearly a thousand miles.

It's rather more likely that you happened across someone relaying the Clare FM stream on a low-power transmitter.
 
Being that there are confirmed reports of US FM being heard in Ireland, it only makes sense the same skip has to go in both directions.

Also, according to YouTube anyway, there seems to be far more DXers over in Europe reporting their catches than here in the US.

And does the lower power transmitter necessarily mean the skip is not possible? There is a DXer in the Florida panhandle who documented a sporadic e opening from central America and one of the stations, 250 watts, sounded almost as strong as the others.

Here's an example of e skip from the US being heard by someone in Ireland.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-A0CxMhD9k

Again, the skip should apply in both directions.
 
gar fla said:
Again, the skip should apply in both directions.
Click to expand...

Indeed it should...but there are many reasons to be at least skeptical of this particular report.

First, the documented examples of US/Canada-to-Ireland FM e-skip are very, very rare. DXers were trying for decades to hear transatlantic E-skip before Paul Logan finally made his logging in 2003. No logging has ever been reported at the distance that would be involved in an Ireland-to-Wisconsin reception.

Second, the power levels involved were several orders of magnitude higher: WFRY and WHCF, the first two stations to make the trip, are both 100 kW signals broadcasting in both vertical and horizontal polarization. The Clare FM transmitter in question runs only a few hundred watts (I need to pull up the relevant database to get the exact details; I'll do so later tonight), and to have heard it on an indoor antenna strains credulity.

Third, the loggings happened at a time when multiple DXers on both sides of the Atlantic were reporting unusually intense E-skip. While there was an opening today, it was a much milder one, with most of the reported reception on the WTFDA list taking a more usual north-south path, primarily Mexico to the eastern US. Paul's 2003 and 2009 reports were corroborated by very intense 6-meter ham radio action between the US and Europe. There were no such reports that I saw today.

Fourth, Paul's reception included more than one station. His 2009 report, in particular, logged more than a dozen stations as the skip made its way up and down the east coast of Canada and the US. If the tiny little 95.9 Clare FM transmitter was really making its way into the midwest, one would expect that the much more powerful Clare FM transmitters nearby on 95.5 and 96.2 would have been heard here as well. (96.2, especially, being on an even frequency not used in the US.) And if those were making it across the pond, there should have been reception of some of the other signals that come from the same sites, too, especially the four very powerful RTE FM signals from Maghera.

Fifth, WFRY in Watertown wasn't yet streaming when Paul logged it in 2003. There was no way he could have made the detailed report he did, with very specific program information, without having heard what he heard.

What are the odds that someone would be streaming Clare FM on "the exact same frequency as in Ireland"? Higher, I'm afraid, that it would be on the particular - and particularly unimportant - frequency that just happens to be the one that RadioTime randomly lists alongside the Clare FM stream. Most Clare FM listeners are hearing the station on its two high-power transmitters at 95.5 and 96.2. I couldn't hear the 95.9 at all when I was driving through County Clare just a month ago.

Is it possible that dxer720 really heard a low-power FM signal from Ireland? Sure, nothing's absolutely impossible. But it seems highly unlikely to me, given today's overall reception conditions and absent some better corroborating evidence.
 
Scott Fybush said:
Is it possible that dxer720 really heard a low-power FM signal from Ireland? Sure, nothing's absolutely impossible. But it seems highly unlikely to me, given today's overall reception conditions and absent some better corroborating evidence.
Click to expand...

Seems extremely unlikely to me as well. There were hundreds of trans-Atlantic 50 MHz (6 meter) ham contacts being made during the times that the DXer in Ireland heard stations over here. There wasn't one contact made today, that I saw. There have been cases of people putting fake DX simulations on youtube in the past, and this might be the case again.
 
I'd hate to think that this was a pirate/practical joke, especially on the exact same frequency.

cd
 
Indeed it would. And sadly, there's a very long history of hoaxes, practical jokes and outright fraud in the DX hobby, going all the way back to the early 1950s when a DXer in England reported reception of channel 2 from Houston, Texas...except the ID he saw was "KLEE-TV," a callsign that the station had changed several years earlier. I believe it was many decades before that was finally confirmed to have been a hoax, though it was widely suspected as such from the beginning.

In more recent decades, the DX community has had to put up with the Bellabarbas, a father-and-son team from Italy who have been sending fake DX reports to US radio stations for years now.

The antidote to all that? Knowledge and experience and a community of knowledgeable, experienced DXers who can pretty quickly sniff out when something's legitimate and when it's not...which is why I'm proud to be a member of the Worldwide TV-FM DX Association and an active participant on their TVFMDX mailing list. I recommend it very, very highly to anyone who's even moderately serious about TV or FM DX.
 
MarioMania said:
With FM Transmitters people could use, I could fool someone
Click to expand...

You sure could. The combination of streaming audio and cheap low-power FM transmitters is potentially a dangerous one.

How can I tell if one is Fake and Real??
Click to expand...

You look for the other factors I cited earlier. It's one thing to simulcast a single stream on a single frequency. It's much harder to simulcast a whole bunch of signals from a target area on a whole bunch of frequencies, especially if they're European FMs on even frequencies (96.2, for instance.) An opening that produces only one station on one frequency with nothing else on any other channel is...well, pretty unlikely to be for real, to say the least. An opening that produces lots of channels from a target area is pretty unlikely to be fake.

It's pretty much impossible to fake an E-skip opening that results in lots of 6-meter (50 MHz) ham radio contacts between the US and Europe...and it's pretty much impossible for FM E-skip to be taking place if 6 meters is dead, as it was today.

And most importantly, you turn to the DX community. We know Paul Logan's 2003 and 2009 catches were for real because there were a lot of other DXers active on both sides of the pond at the same time, hearing things that corroborated Paul's reception. There's no substitute for an active list like the mailing list that WTFDA runs.
 
I'm not sure if one can tell, Mario.

I'm in WTFDA too, and a year or two ago there was a guy (1) claiming to live in Los Angeles, and (2) claiming to have caught about 6 FM stations out of San Salvador, El Salvador. Turned out to be a hoax & the guy was gone.

Why anyone would lie about catching a station is beyond me (referring to the L.A. guy).

There *was* a time when I'd be proud of hearing a station loud and clear on my DX archives....but nowadays, with so many stations streaming, the only proof would be heavy fading & hissing, etc.!

cd
 
I mean they...typo

My Wireless FM Transmitter goes like 900 ft, I use it to listen too my music on my Laptop

If I did have a 1 watt transmitter, I would still use it to listen to my music on my laptop
 
I've been a DXer for over 30 years. I've never received a trans-Atlantic FM band signal. I didn't honestly believe that this would've been one. I just didn't know what Claire FM was. This explains why I didn't find it on Radio Locator.

I will not log it as a reception of Claire FM, because it's not the actual station, but some sort of relay that could be from anywhere.

Look at the video & you decide
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I70XfIB_dMY

Even I am very skeptical. Especially now knowing where the station is from & it's relatively low. power. Especially since there didn't seem to be other activity on the band at the time.

I've heard stations from the US East coast a few times, but there's always been other activity from that same area on other frequencies. I'd say today's conditions on the band were everyday normal. Nothing special.

That low-power transmitter seems most likely to me, but 95.9 isn't a good clear frequency here in Lake Geneva. WKLG, here in town is 6KW at 96.1 & Milwaukee has WRIT on 95.7 with it's HD hash on 95.5 & 95.9.

If this is a low-power transmitter, the fading patterns would suggest to me that the transmitter would have to be in a moving vehicle. If so, that vehicle wouldn't be moving very fast, as those type of modulators aren't very powerful. Unless the transmitter were modified, or installed improperly.

I have a few Tecsun DSP radio & my Sony XDR-S10HDiP that also uses some DSP. These are the only radios that I own that can achieve enough selectivity to be "quiet" on 95.9.
 
Wow! It may not be Ireland, but seeing the YT video, it sure has the "rarity" aspect of TA FM, not unlike the WHCF from N. Ireland. Nice lookin' radio too.

cd
 
One thing I can say is that fading in and out sounds like quintessential sporadic e reception.

And yeah, what a nice looking radio.
 
If that was someone in your neighborhood pulling a prank, I'd have to say it's pretty well orchestrated,
and almost irrational to think someone would be actively dxing and pick it up their relayed signal.
But it is Lake Geneva, and there are enough people in the area with "spare income and free time" to
do whatever they want.

Does anyone nearby know that you dx FM?
Have you ever heard anything that sounded questionable before (for any reason).

There's a part 15 FM in my neighborhood running a stream of all old-time crime drama shows, and
the audio makes it pretty clear right away that it's not a "real" signal.

The audio density on the Youtube video sounds dense and transparent enough in the strong moments to
be either the real thing, or the work of a VERY dedicated audio/radio signal spoofer.

Never say never. The best part about radio is in such moments.
 
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