Thanks for the kind words. But luck...including being in the right place at the right time....has a lot to do with it. I also had the good fortune to travel in my work for nearly 40 years, so I got to sample DX in 49 states, coast to coast in Canada, and eight countries in Europe. As good as that was, the remote online receivers (SDRs) are just as much fun....if not more so....,IMHO. I highly recommend them. The one in Arctic Norway...and others in northwestern Europe....are fantastic in winter. No shortage of stations from the U.S. and Canada, some with 5kw or less, that can make the hop on a good night.
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DXing in the 1950s and today
- Thread starter Ken Gustafson
- Start date
Thanks for the kind words. But luck...including being in the right place at the right time....has a lot to do with it. I also had the good fortune to travel in my work for nearly 40 years, so I got to sample DX in 49 states, coast to coast in Canada, and eight countries in Europe. As good as that was, the remote online receivers (SDRs) are just as much fun....if not more so....,IMHO. I highly recommend them. The one in Arctic Norway...and others in northwestern Europe....are fantastic in winter. No shortage of stations from the U.S. and Canada, some with 5kw or less, that can make the hop on a good night.
I didn't get to participate in ham radio Field Day this weekend (our local event was cancelled..well, moved to hams individual homes due to COVID). The next best thing was to listen to the activity on some of the SDRS (Edinburg IN, North of Atlanta, Montana and Hawaii). Very interesting, especially 40 meters.
Agreed, the Arctic receiver is great fun in winter.
Me too. And for many years I did not even know I was DXing. I did not have a clue what DXing was.
I was born in early 1960's in what was then Czechoslovakia. My parents were both Greek, who settled in that country after WW2 and Greek civil war. Once I reached teenage years, me and my friends would try to listen to western European AM radio stations so we could hear the latest rock & roll hits, which were not available in record stores or on the government stations controlled by the Czechoslovakian government. One station we would tune the most was Radio Luxembourg on 1440 kHz as they were playing all the latest hits. While tuning in Radio Luxembourg I would also explore the rest of the AM band and I started keeping track of what I was hearing. I did not know what I was doing was really DXing. I discovered Greek AM stations and started listening to soccer games from Greece every Sunday. At the same time I discovered that besides the AM band there was also Long Wave as well as Shortwave to explore. I used to scan all the bands and discovered stations that were broadcasting in Czech and Slovak languages. Voice of America, Deutsche Welle, Radio Free Europe were audible even though they were heavily jammed by the authorities. I used to keep track of what frequencies the stations were using, so I could tune to them again.
In 1976 my family moved to Chicago. Along with me came a Russian made radio called VEF206. It's coverage included LW, AM and all the shortwave bands including 60 and 75 meter bands. When I first used the receiver in Chicago I noticed that there were no stations on the LW band, and the first AM station I tuned in was not in English but in French (CJBC on 860 kHz). Since my English was not so good I tried to tune in to the Czech/Slovak language shortwave stations that I used to catch in Czechoslovakia. Besides VOA, RFE I also listened to Radio Prague to get news from the old country. While tuning around I would stumble on the various DX programs available back then. That's how I finally learned about DXing. I would make sure not to miss any airings of Glen Hauser's World of Radio, RCI's Shortwave Listener's Digest or Radio Nederlands DX Juke Box. That was around 1979 and from that point on I started seriously DXing AM and shortwave, with FM and TV DXing to follow.
Through the DX programs I learned about DX clubs and as a result became a longtime member of NRC and NASWA. I was also broefly a member of IRCA. Around 1981 I learned about the local DX club, the Chicago Area DX Club or CADX for short. I quickly became a member and started attending the local DXers meetings. Eventually I became an editor in the club's bulletin called DX Chicago and even maintained the clubs web page after 1998. Eventually the club died down and the only contact with ex-CADXers is via e-mail or Facebook.
Throughout the years DXing has changed dramatically. I still attempt to DX once in a while, but not as much as I used in the past. I do enjoy tuning in some of the SDR's when I have free time. I also stopped QSLing stations back in mid 1990's.
On AM I heard well over 1,500 stations, 48 states (43 QSLed), 9 Canadian provinces (8 QSLed), 33 foreign countries (24 QSLed)
On shortwave I heard 217 countries (per NASWA country list) with 198 verified.
CADXER, Interesting story. Thanks for sharing.
WKAR 870 used to get a special authorization to be off the air on Holidays, and that's the first I heard CJBC 860, at least in the Daytime. I don't remember when they changed to French language, or if I ever heard it in English. I'll look it up.
October 1, 1964 was when it went to French Fulltime. I seem to remember it being in English, so I think I did hear it. It was not a CBC
owned station before that.
It was somewhat controversial when the CBC took control of all the true fully protected I-A and I-B frequencies. They tried to appease CFRB by claiming that 1010 was a I-B, but as we all know, they get a lot of interference from WINS. It is technically impossible for a 50 kW station that close to protect CFRB like a true Class I/Class A. It was probably done with interference RATIOS. So where CJBC had a Nighttime 50% skywave of 5 mV/m, WINS only had to protect CFRB in Canada to 250 uV/m 10% skywave, 10 times the 25 uV/m 10% skywave to give them 0.5 mV/m 50% skywave service. And CFRB had been on 690 kHz I-A nondirectional. Canada then moved 690 to Montreal. WLW was ordered to install a rudimentary DA when they went to 500 kW, and CFRB complained.
October 1, 1964 was when it went to French Fulltime. I seem to remember it being in English, so I think I did hear it. It was not a CBC
owned station before that.
It was somewhat controversial when the CBC took control of all the true fully protected I-A and I-B frequencies. They tried to appease CFRB by claiming that 1010 was a I-B, but as we all know, they get a lot of interference from WINS. It is technically impossible for a 50 kW station that close to protect CFRB like a true Class I/Class A. It was probably done with interference RATIOS. So where CJBC had a Nighttime 50% skywave of 5 mV/m, WINS only had to protect CFRB in Canada to 250 uV/m 10% skywave, 10 times the 25 uV/m 10% skywave to give them 0.5 mV/m 50% skywave service. And CFRB had been on 690 kHz I-A nondirectional. Canada then moved 690 to Montreal. WLW was ordered to install a rudimentary DA when they went to 500 kW, and CFRB complained.
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I used to hear WKAR fairly well in the Chicago area before the noise level on AM went up so much.
Thanks for posting your interesting story, CADXER. One question: obviously during the Cold War RFE and other SW stations broadcasting to Eastern Europe from the West were jammed. Were any of the MW stations?
From your story it looks like MW wasn't jammed.... If you could hear Radio Luxembourg OK, I'm guessing other MW stations from Western Europe were also in the clear.
From your story it looks like MW wasn't jammed.... If you could hear Radio Luxembourg OK, I'm guessing other MW stations from Western Europe were also in the clear.
@CDDXER....Great story! My thanks also for posting it.
Having spent more than 25 years of my career working for British companies, I had the good fortune to travel there and other countries in Europe once or twice a year on average. My daughter also lived in London for 11 years, married an Englishman, and actually spent a couple of months studying in Prague, after which she was offered a teaching job there. She turned it down, but she loved the city, and she and my son in law went back to visit a couple of times.
Anyway, every time I went "across the pond" I always found time for DXing. I was like "a kid in a candy store"....even though at least half of the time, I didn't know what I was hearing! One of my favorite aspects of DX in Europe was hearing more music programming than here in North Ameruca. Also, most of the individual channels are somewhat less crowded than here. When I was in Italy four years ago,hitting the "scan" button during daytime in my rental car radio only brought up two or three stations. The rest of the AM band was blank. FM, of course, was a different story. Jam packed! David has referred to FM in Italy as "The Wild West". An apt and excellent description. This is all evolving as more and more AM (MW) stations shut down and/or migrate to FM....assuming they can find space there. And, as might be expected, music on AM is also decreasing, although there's still considerably more than there is here.
One thing I've tried to do without any success in Europe has been transatlantic DX. I'm pretty sure radioman and a few others on this board have done it. But I've still had several pretty nice catches. Radio Moscow on 1233khz on my SRF37 Walkman in my hotel room in the north of England one morning at sunrise. Daytime skywave from Capital Gold London on 1548 in another hotel room in Stuttgart, Germany (98kw aimed southeast certainly facilitated that one!....90 miles northwest of London, it's barely audible.)
Of course now with SDRs in Europe you don't need to be in Europe traveling from place to place to experience the diverse nature of European DX!
Having spent more than 25 years of my career working for British companies, I had the good fortune to travel there and other countries in Europe once or twice a year on average. My daughter also lived in London for 11 years, married an Englishman, and actually spent a couple of months studying in Prague, after which she was offered a teaching job there. She turned it down, but she loved the city, and she and my son in law went back to visit a couple of times.
Anyway, every time I went "across the pond" I always found time for DXing. I was like "a kid in a candy store"....even though at least half of the time, I didn't know what I was hearing! One of my favorite aspects of DX in Europe was hearing more music programming than here in North Ameruca. Also, most of the individual channels are somewhat less crowded than here. When I was in Italy four years ago,hitting the "scan" button during daytime in my rental car radio only brought up two or three stations. The rest of the AM band was blank. FM, of course, was a different story. Jam packed! David has referred to FM in Italy as "The Wild West". An apt and excellent description. This is all evolving as more and more AM (MW) stations shut down and/or migrate to FM....assuming they can find space there. And, as might be expected, music on AM is also decreasing, although there's still considerably more than there is here.
One thing I've tried to do without any success in Europe has been transatlantic DX. I'm pretty sure radioman and a few others on this board have done it. But I've still had several pretty nice catches. Radio Moscow on 1233khz on my SRF37 Walkman in my hotel room in the north of England one morning at sunrise. Daytime skywave from Capital Gold London on 1548 in another hotel room in Stuttgart, Germany (98kw aimed southeast certainly facilitated that one!....90 miles northwest of London, it's barely audible.)
Of course now with SDRs in Europe you don't need to be in Europe traveling from place to place to experience the diverse nature of European DX!
Put me down as another who is ditto-ing CADXers' great post!
After a few decades of DXing on AM, I fell into Short-Wave DX. In 1990, of all years. That's a pretty late start, I admit.
I was in a basement apartment in NE Philly, using a Lafayette HA-600 -- a terrific AM/SW radio for the price. Although not as selective as their older HA-700, it was more than adequate for me on AM.
Thing is, selective and sensitive as it was: The analog-dials of the HA-600 had horrible frequency determination. So I bought an equal-size piece of plexiglass and some of those wee, skinny ribbons of multicoloured tape and set to work. I did the whole AM band, and decided that the new dial worked fine. But it looked stupid, all by itself. So I measured off WWV 10,000 and worked down on the 31 (?) metre band next, and found some great stuff, even from a basement apartment with a 30' longwire taped to the ceiling.
HCJB on 9745 was the first ID -- and right on the button with the new dial. Something called KGEI was the next logging. Deutschewelle (I'm sure I spelled that right, hi) was 9690. One early sunrise, pretty much dawn out, Radio Australia was there on 9655, 9760 and 9580. The Radio Prague sounder near the top of the hour was my favorite. The great Radio Rumbos from Venezuela and their doorbell/gong SFX morning newscasts were a treat, on 9630.
Etc.
In any case, 31m became my new radio dial for entertainment.
* * * * * * *
@ CADXer : Way back in the mid-60's, we as kids were always puzzled by this station on 1440 that seemingly tested with a 1 kHz tone at night but never IDed. 9PM ... 10PM .... no ID.
Well, it wasn't a US station. We learned that the 'pest tone' was the 1kHz het from Radio Luxembourg .... the resultant mix of America's 1,440,000 cycles minus R.Lux's 1,439,000 cycles. We even caught some audio from them once or twice thereafter.
'Greek heritage', huh? (Pinches cheek. 'Hey-hey. Who loves ya, baybee?' hi)
After a few decades of DXing on AM, I fell into Short-Wave DX. In 1990, of all years. That's a pretty late start, I admit.
I was in a basement apartment in NE Philly, using a Lafayette HA-600 -- a terrific AM/SW radio for the price. Although not as selective as their older HA-700, it was more than adequate for me on AM.
Thing is, selective and sensitive as it was: The analog-dials of the HA-600 had horrible frequency determination. So I bought an equal-size piece of plexiglass and some of those wee, skinny ribbons of multicoloured tape and set to work. I did the whole AM band, and decided that the new dial worked fine. But it looked stupid, all by itself. So I measured off WWV 10,000 and worked down on the 31 (?) metre band next, and found some great stuff, even from a basement apartment with a 30' longwire taped to the ceiling.
HCJB on 9745 was the first ID -- and right on the button with the new dial. Something called KGEI was the next logging. Deutschewelle (I'm sure I spelled that right, hi) was 9690. One early sunrise, pretty much dawn out, Radio Australia was there on 9655, 9760 and 9580. The Radio Prague sounder near the top of the hour was my favorite. The great Radio Rumbos from Venezuela and their doorbell/gong SFX morning newscasts were a treat, on 9630.
Etc.
In any case, 31m became my new radio dial for entertainment.
* * * * * * *
@ CADXer : Way back in the mid-60's, we as kids were always puzzled by this station on 1440 that seemingly tested with a 1 kHz tone at night but never IDed. 9PM ... 10PM .... no ID.
Well, it wasn't a US station. We learned that the 'pest tone' was the 1kHz het from Radio Luxembourg .... the resultant mix of America's 1,440,000 cycles minus R.Lux's 1,439,000 cycles. We even caught some audio from them once or twice thereafter.
'Greek heritage', huh? (Pinches cheek. 'Hey-hey. Who loves ya, baybee?' hi)
I am amazed at these numbers.... of the 1500+ AM stations how many did you hear from your local area? Recently I surpassed 300 and it's becoming harder and harder for me to find new stations... I couldn't imagine ever hitting 1500.
The 1500 number was definitely in the top tier of station count.
Repeating a bit of what I posted earlier: when I began DXing in the late 50's, there were old timers with 3,000 to 4,000 stations verified... but that was over perhaps a 30 year period. I managed just a few under 2,500 verified and 2,800 heard in about 6 years from Cleveland, including all 50 US states, the then-10 Canadian provinces and, if I recall correctly, 87 countries from Egypt to Australia.
The difference was that there were many stations that signed off at midnight or even 11 PM, and most were off on Monday mornings. Add in hundreds of radio club DX programs and frequency checks along with daytimers on at night and directional stations on non-directional for hurricanes and floods and it was not hard to get totals in that range.
Of course, the man-made noise was vastly less as well.
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I did capture transatlantic DX in the London area one morning just before local sunrise. My goal was to hear one of the four Chicago blowtorches. That didn't happen. However, in September of 1977 in London I did hear WCBS-AM. My wife thought I was crazy getting up in the morning just before local London sunrise to capture DX from North America. I was setup by the window with a pair of headphones so she could sleep. You know how us DXers are. The radio was a very good Panasonic, but I don't remember the model number.
BTW: I enjoyed Capital Radio and Radio Luxembourg while I was there very much. Heard alot of good music which I never heard stateside.
They were all from 3 different locations in the same local area (Chicago) not too far from each other. Two of the locations were in the northwest side of Chicago (near Irving Park and Harlem) and my current location in Wood Dale, IL just west of the O'Hare Int. Airport.
Like DavidEduardo pointed out DXing the AM band (or SW for that matter) was much different in the past. It was much easier to log new stations. The noise level in those days was much lower as well.
There were Chicago area based DXers (and members of CADX) that had higher totals in their log books than me.
Only the MW stations that were broadcasting in Czech and Slovak languages were jammed. Of those only Radio Free Europe had extensive MW transmission schedule towards Czechoslovakia. I remember they were using a a transmitter in Germany on the frequency of 720 kHz and it was heavily jammed, although if you got out of the metropolitan areas the jamming was not as strong and you could actually listen to the broadcasts. It is my understanding that they had jamming transmitters (varying in power between 1 - 30 kw) installed close to all the major metropolitan areas.
VOA and BBC also used MW transmitters to broadcast to Czechoslovakia, but they did not have extensive schedules in Czech and Slovak languages. VOA was using a transmitter in Munich and BBC in England. Those transmissions were also jammed.
Regular programming of western European countries that was not directed towards Czechoslovakia was not jammed.
When I came to US in 1976, Kojak was running on CBS and became one of my favorite shows at that time. Sadly it was cancelled two years later.
BTW, thanks to Ken Gustafson for opening a great topic.
I once got WHAS in Bellingham, WA many years ago. It IS a prize catch (typically on 840, I got something out of 100 Mile House, BC. And sometimes the Las Vegas 840 came in, but I was hearing WHAS over both of them on my car radio.)
Back to Newton Minow and his probable views of Top 40 radio, he is still alive and on some board in Chicago, along with another attorney who married my cousin. When she was young, she was heavily into WLS and Top 40 radio. After she got involved with the Ivy/Oxford lawyer guy, she only listened to WFMT. It was glued down to 98.7 even on the kitchen radio. They listened to it all the time, and even listened to Studs Terkel. So you can imagine what Holiday dinners were like, when politics "trumped" (pardon the term if it offends you either way) all other family conversations!
What a fun topic. For me, getting a multi-band radio for my 1969 birthday was the opening of the radio DX door. Until then, I knew about shortwave but had no idea you could hear an AM station from far away at night. At 9 p.m. on a Sunday night, there appeared WSM Nashville, with the old "National Accident and Life Insurance" ID going into NBC Monitor News on the Hour. Here I was in the suburbs of Chicago, knowing I was on to something.
We had a bunch of travel pamphlets that I recalled had lists of radio and TV stations. Those became a checklist. A list of stations carrying NHL games also helped, though I had no idea what stations were at particular power. A copy of the White's Log in then-new Communications World clued me in, and I piled up a bunch of clear channel and regional stations quickly. It was amazing that I could pull in a KMJ Fresno one night on 580 when conditions were just right, or that KFI would become close to a regular two hours after Chicago sunset, when Cuba was nulled, and vice versa.
It's amazing in retrospect how many of those clear-channel stations were NBC affiliates. You could roll across the dial to 640-650-660-670-700 (and 680 KNBR when WMAQ was off on Monday morning) for News on the Hour. CBS was solid up the dial with 780-830-840-870, ABC was here and there with its multi-network approach, and Mutual was almost a rumor until the graveyard, at least in Chicago.
Most of this was accomplished with a 6-band Radio Shack unit, though I discovered the little Sony pocket radio could grab many a station as well. Happily, I was and remain in an area without much interference, so when the dial lights up at night, I don't have to worry about neighbors with light dimmers and the like. So one night when Auroral conditions opened up Central and South America a bit, I was able to ID stations from Colombia, Venezuela and Nicaragua, plus then-pests PJB-800 and Belize-834. There were even a few nights with the hetrodyne howls of interference right where high-powered Europeans should have been, though I never got an ID. Shortwave yielded Europe and other distant points.
I DXed TV before getting that radio, if only to see if I could get blacked-out Bears games, almost always without success. It was more that Milwaukee stations would float in late on a summer evening, enough that I was a semi-regular viewer of WTMJ's 10 p.m. news from 100 miles away. A tremendous inversion on Jan. 20, 1969, the morning of Nixon's inauguration, yielded first receptions of South Bend and Rockford TV before sunrise, and showed what good tropo looked like. That issue of CW with the White's Log also explained e-skip, which was amazing. Live TV from Cuba, Quebec, New Mexico and Idaho!
It's been great fun, entertaining and informative. Who knew Radio Moscow carried sports until Game 8 of the Summit Series with Canada for bragging rights in hockey? I couldn't get CBC Northern Service that afternoon so listened to the end of the deciding game in Russian after school. I could get the names and little else but could tell Canada won. A decade later, a satellite dish planted in the yard, and I could watch CBC. The magic continues.
We had a bunch of travel pamphlets that I recalled had lists of radio and TV stations. Those became a checklist. A list of stations carrying NHL games also helped, though I had no idea what stations were at particular power. A copy of the White's Log in then-new Communications World clued me in, and I piled up a bunch of clear channel and regional stations quickly. It was amazing that I could pull in a KMJ Fresno one night on 580 when conditions were just right, or that KFI would become close to a regular two hours after Chicago sunset, when Cuba was nulled, and vice versa.
It's amazing in retrospect how many of those clear-channel stations were NBC affiliates. You could roll across the dial to 640-650-660-670-700 (and 680 KNBR when WMAQ was off on Monday morning) for News on the Hour. CBS was solid up the dial with 780-830-840-870, ABC was here and there with its multi-network approach, and Mutual was almost a rumor until the graveyard, at least in Chicago.
Most of this was accomplished with a 6-band Radio Shack unit, though I discovered the little Sony pocket radio could grab many a station as well. Happily, I was and remain in an area without much interference, so when the dial lights up at night, I don't have to worry about neighbors with light dimmers and the like. So one night when Auroral conditions opened up Central and South America a bit, I was able to ID stations from Colombia, Venezuela and Nicaragua, plus then-pests PJB-800 and Belize-834. There were even a few nights with the hetrodyne howls of interference right where high-powered Europeans should have been, though I never got an ID. Shortwave yielded Europe and other distant points.
I DXed TV before getting that radio, if only to see if I could get blacked-out Bears games, almost always without success. It was more that Milwaukee stations would float in late on a summer evening, enough that I was a semi-regular viewer of WTMJ's 10 p.m. news from 100 miles away. A tremendous inversion on Jan. 20, 1969, the morning of Nixon's inauguration, yielded first receptions of South Bend and Rockford TV before sunrise, and showed what good tropo looked like. That issue of CW with the White's Log also explained e-skip, which was amazing. Live TV from Cuba, Quebec, New Mexico and Idaho!
It's been great fun, entertaining and informative. Who knew Radio Moscow carried sports until Game 8 of the Summit Series with Canada for bragging rights in hockey? I couldn't get CBC Northern Service that afternoon so listened to the end of the deciding game in Russian after school. I could get the names and little else but could tell Canada won. A decade later, a satellite dish planted in the yard, and I could watch CBC. The magic continues.
And CBC was in the clear on C-Band satellite for many years - CBMT, CBC North and the CBFT SRC feed. I've found a couple VHS recordings of programs directly from CBC North in the past. They used to air a scrolling weather 'bulletin' several times a day with music and forecasts scrolling by, for communities in the Yukon, Nunavut and NWT.
Didn't have to worry about a dish growing up! I had CBUT on cable north of Seattle.
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