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Cyberdad Meets E-skip?

cyberdad

cyberdad

Could it possibly be true?

I was outside late this afternoon watering some sod that had been installed following a tree stump removal in my front lawn. I had the SRF-37 Walkman in my pocket listening to my spotify stream, which I broadcast on my Whole House FM transmitter tuned to 92.1. Normally, that has a range of about a half a block. But there I was in my front yard, when a religious call-in talk show overtook the channel.

Normally, if my modulator is off, I hear either Racine, WI (about 50 miles) or Madison, WI (about 80 miles). So I assumed this was tropo or some other type of relatively short skip. So later this evening, I checked Radio-Locator for religious stations, and discovered that none were within 600 miles of me. To my surprise, The closest is a a low-power outlet in Kansas. WHHR in Vienna, GA caught my eye, so I went to their website. Sure enough, the program listed as airing at 6pm Eastern/5pm Central was a call-in talk show and matched what I was hearing.

The station was only present for about three minutes, then disappeared. I moved to a known dead spot in modulator's coverage area, and what I heard there was Racine.

So.....could it be that I stumbled upon what would have been a nice catch? 5100 watts at what I roughly calculate to be about 800 miles. If I did, it was just dumb luck.
 
While WHHR-92.1 is a realistic E-skip target, Wednesday afternoon/evening there was no E skip in the US as far as I can tell. What you heard is probably something else. There has been some meteor scatter activity around, but that is more fleeting.... rarely more than several seconds, and weaker than E-skip. It would be tough on a Walkman.
 
That's a real good catch for a SRF-37 Walkman.

It's a great radio for AM DXing considering it's size but it's not the best FM DXing.

Depending on what specific position the earphone antenna chord is in, mine sometimes gets a weak signal even with the locals.

Still a nice convenient solid little radio to have.
 
I appreciate the congratulations, but I'm not sure I had WHHR. As DTVdxer points out, there were no known e-skip conditions anywhere in the U.S. when I heard the religious talk show.
 
cyberdad said:
I appreciate the congratulations, but I'm not sure I had WHHR. As DTVdxer points out, there were no known e-skip conditions anywhere in the U.S. when I heard the religious talk show.
Click to expand...

With every E Skip catch I had this summer, none of them were showing any current MUFs even close to as high as the FM band on the map at the time.
 
I'm at a loss to figure out what it was. And I don't want to "claim" anything...other than "dumb luck".
 
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