If you like to pick up distant radio signals, you might find my experience with that in Alaska of interest.
I was an avid AM DXer from the midwest when I first landed in Nome, Alaska in the early 1980s to consult and volunteer for one of its two radio stations. Poor ground conductivity was a factor in not being able to hear much from afar, and the high level of electromagnetism in the atmosphere from the aurora borealis seemed to prevent much from coming in on either AM or Shortwave.
Electrical interference from flourescent light fixtures, etc was also a problem, particularly making it hard for people living in remote villages to pick up a clear signal from their nearest local station (which for many was 100-200+ miles from the two AM transmitters in Nome). The two 50kw AMs in Anchorage sometimes came in at night, as well as the 10kw AMs elsewhere along the West of Alaska and Anchorage. Fairbanks, not so much. Also, KGO San Francisco and KFBK Sacramento put in the strongest signals aross Alaska at night, due to their directional arrays, plus AM690 and AM1090 from Tijuana. I've regularly heard each of them in Nome, Bethel, Anchorage, Fairbanks, and on the road to the Yukon after dark.
Late one night all of the AMs from Hilo, Hawaii came in fairly well in Nome, too. But not much from Honolulu. But that only happened for a night or two and whatever ionosphere condition that allowed it went away.
The Russians, during the Soviet days, did not operate any high power AM facilities to reach the US along the Bering Sea. Once I picked up a Russian signal on or near AM1000, but only once. I later understood they used a combination of shortwave and carrier current signals within their buildings, since their villages consisted mostly of one large block apartment building in which everybody lived. (I also believe some of their gulag prisons were sheltered a bit inland from the Bering Sea coast as well, so it was strictly 'off limits' for Westerners. One native high school basketball team from W Alaska was invited to play once in the Russian Arctic, but had to fly all the way around the world thru Moscow to get there, before the "iron curtain" along the internatinoal date line was lifted following the collapse of the USSR.)
Shortwave reception, like AM, was also affected by the aurora. Often at night before the northern lights became active, you could see a green arc in the sky to the northeast, much like a rainbow would make. (I think it was the green electromagnetic arc around the magnetic north pole, or at least around the far north of the planet!) Later at night, the northern lights would often start to eminate from that arc, and deaden the AM reception from far away.
Best Shortwave reception was mornings from New Zealand and Australia. And a dozen or more frequencies of varying strength relayed a lovely service of traditional Russian folk music and short orchestra pieces from Radio Moscow, with a 5 minute newscast, and sometimes a commentary, at the top of the hour (in Russian, of course, for domestic audiences. It was the same national service I once picked up on AM 1000.) If you've ever seen the movie "Never Cry Wolf" about a scientst camping in the arctic, it would be the same service he was shown to listen to in the dead of the arctic winter to retain some sanity in the wilderness.
In Anchorage, where I lived in the late 1990s, major RF interference from the local AM & TV transmitters overwhelmed the chance to pick up much on shortwave. You often had to drive a half hour out of town for the AM signals to weaken in order to hear the nighttime AMs from Vancouver, Victoria, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Sacramento and Tijuana. And you didn't drive far at night in the winter if you didn't have to. But with a relatively simple analog AM radio, I could still often pick up KGO AM810 and KFBK AM1530, tho' the weekend overnight hosts were often just too darned irritating to listen to!
Once in Nome, the engineer at one of the AMs took me to the transmitter shack to hook up a GE Superradio to the tower when the station was off the air after midnight. Signals that you couldn't pick up with a standard radio antenna came booming in from Korea, Japan, Taiwan and China (9khz spacing also meant a lot of 'heterodyning' high pitched interference, too). It was fascinating, especially when you realized you were just as close to Korea as to Chicago. I think the furthest AM signal from the States I remember finding once in Alaska was a faint WCCO from Minneapolis.
And a particularly weird FM DX happened one summer afternoon in Glenallen - in 1982 before they had any FM radio there. I turned on my trusty Panasonic RF-2200 to FM just to see if I could find anything, and to experience a completely empty band for the first time. A stray FM signal from somewhere in Canada (I could just make out enough audio to figure that out) strayed across my dial for about 20 seconds. I found it around the low part of the FM dial and followed as it quickly drifted up the dial and soon disappeared past 108FM. Sort of a radio phantom passing thru. Never heard that before. Come to think of it, I once saw a shadow of what I think was a ghost do a similar pass across the wall once in San Francisco years ago. (And several friends who were with me at the time so it too, so it's not my imagination.) I guess in the end we really are all just frequencies that pass in the night air.
