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DXing the locals today WZKY/WAGL

Mike Sheridan

Mike Sheridan

I'm listening around the AM dial to see what is going on. I first landed on WZKY and it amazes me they don't have a stronger signal here at my house on the east side of Charlotte. They are doing the ABC Oldies format with ABC news on the hour.

I moved down the dial to 1560 where WAGL's 50KW signal and "Music of Your Life" type programming is putting a good signal into my radio. Too bad there aren't some local announcers, just segued music off the computer but they are doing a nice job with it. Really old music...I know just about all the songs and artists :'(
 
Mike,

Someone had told me that there signal went lousy when they added am stereo. Don't know if thats true or not. However I notice at lunch today there is alot of FM "skip"....which is rare. I was listening to G105 in Raleigh(clear), 94.7 there as well and all the Greenville-Spartanburg stations were coming in very strong in Uptown. It only happens once or twice a year during the summer, but i like it when you start hearing FM stations from the other side of the Mississippi and they start interfering with the local FM's. All their calls begin with a K.... which doesn't stand for 104.7 :)
 
Speaking for FM DX I had a really stange thing happen to me on a road trip to see a friend of mine who was living in Quincy, IL home of Harris and Broadcast Electronics. I was getting within FM range of St. Louis so I thought I would scan the band for St. Louis stations. Instead of the St. Louis FM's I heard some Dallas FM's!

I used to work in Monroe and when there was FM skip in the morning WLNK would get killed by it.
 
Mike,

WAGL usually comes in very strong here in East Central FL, especially during critical hours, even over the 1560 in Melborne not too far from where I live.

Are there any Florida stations audible in the Metrolina area (WFLF 540, WOKV 690)?

Regards,

Bill in E. Central FL
 
Bill,

Looking at the WAGL pattern I'm not surprised. Most of it is beamed south with a small lobe to the north.

Florida stations are not an easy catch for us here. It might be different at the coast. I have heard WOKV 690, WFLF 540, and WFTL 850 but not on a regular basis. During hurricanes I've heard WIOD, WAXY, and WINZ all in Miami. During a serious storm stations are allowed to broadcast at full power without being directional so they can serve people in the path of the storm.

When I worked in Miami at 560 WQAM we had a guy who listened to the station in Pennsylvania. WQAM is 5KW day 1KW night non-directional. I have never heard them here.

73,

Mike W4DXL
 
I have picked up WFLF 540 both in South Carolina, where I live (Beaufort/Hilton Head Island area) and in Savannah, Georgia where the radio station is at!! This is always between 0400-0500 as I am driving into the station!!! I am going to see if I can pick up WOKV 690 in the morning!!


Chris Roberts
Hilton Head Island, SC







KE4KLS_Radio said:
Mike,

WAGL usually comes in very strong here in East Central FL, especially during critical hours, even over the 1560 in Melborne not too far from where I live.

Are there any Florida stations audible in the Metrolina area (WFLF 540, WOKV 690)?

Regards,

Bill in E. Central FL
Click to expand...
 
The 1560 in Clemson, SC is Off Air/Silent so that *might* help the reception of WAGL 1560.

I heard it here in Abbeville on a car radio under the drive-in of a local Hardees.

WHen I was along the Spacecoast of Florida(Cocoa/Melbourne) you could hear 540 WFLF from ORLANDO(Pine Hills) like a damned local 24/7!
 
Chris in Hilton Head---If you can't pick up WOKV CLEARLY during the daylight hours, there must be something wrong. During 690s days as top 40 WAPE, it was a major presence all the way up the coast to the southern outer banks in NC. It was THE top 40 station in Myrtle Beach until FM kicked in in the 70s. And yes, I have picked up WOKV from time to time here in the southern Charlotte area, during critical hours. I am surprised that people are recieving WAGL so well in Charlotte. I live about 7-8 miles north of their transmitter and get a very poor signal---no great loss considering their programing, however, I can remember back in the 70s they were a pretty good top 40....
 
WZKY's signal actually improved alot when Bill finally put the old Raytheon transmitter out in the parking lot and installed a new BE 1kw. ZKY went from no signal past Mount Pleasant to booming into Concord with a clean sound.
 
ref: about WZKY in AM Stereo

The fact that WZKY broadcasts in AM Stereo has had no effect on its signal strength. I should know because I converted it to AM stereo in 1984 and we did all sorts of field strength tests, both at the time and also later. You may be on the east side of Charlotte, but WZKY's antenna and tower is on the east side of Albemarle. Remember, it's also at 1580, so you don't get the coverage like our sister station, 1010, does at the same 1 kw. of power. In 2004, I sold the station to Matt Smith who is doiing a superb job as an owner and operator. the ABC oldies is a rather recent addition. Up until last year, the station originated all its own programming.
 
AM Stereo WILL kill you in the fringes of your coverage. That's why most AM talk stations turned it off! That and the fact that NOBODY CARES about AM stereo!
 
Making a blanket statement such as "nobody cares about AM Stereo" is pretty crass. I care about it, and I am not a nobody! WNMB in North Myrtle Beach has quite a few listeners who hear the station in AM Stereo and they care about it. In fact, several of them have written to us and some are posted on our website under the listener input and AM Stereo sections. Now, is AM Stereo an overall force in the marketplace. No, it isn't. However, such a statement as your does nothing but show uninformed arrogance.
 
According to some definitions, if a body has less than a million arms and a million legs it's really a nobody.

In that definition, large portions of this country are NOBODY. Certainly those who DX radio signals are nobody, as are those who haven't junked their AM stereo receivers.

There's an old story about a meeting of all the organs of the body, which declared the anal spinctre muscle a "nobody". If you don't remember the outcome, ask your grandpa!

Later....
Matt Smith
WGSR-TV
 
AM Stereo

I enjoyed AM Stereo and thought it was an improvement. I bought a Sony AM Stereo car radio and still have my Realistic tuner. Then again I worked for WSOC-AM and WBT at the time (the '80's). It did make AM sound better most of the time. The receivers were wide band which improved the high frequency response.

It was not FM though, AM will never sound as good as FM can. As we all know the frequency response and noise free reception on FM are the real factors that make FM sound better. FM mono if the processing is done right will sound better than AM Stereo every time.

I joke that I seem to be attracted to doomed technology. In addition to my AM Stereo radio I also own a couple of Minidisc recorders. Hey I missed out on the Betamax VCR, never owned one!
 
;D Mike, you happen to know the whereabouts of Jim Dunlap?
 
AM Stereo could have been a great thing - had it really caught on in the 80s AND if the FCC had mandated AM Stereo be built into all receiveds (kinda like UHF TV). Problem is, they left it to the industry to decide and the industry pissed into the wind for ten or 12 years and gave up.

I remember when I worked at WKIX, we gave away thousands of AM Stereo receivers - still couldn't make a dent in the market with them. Demand was so low. The FM types never believed it would be as good as FM, and those who loved AM, didn't really care about the stereo.

You would be hard pressed to purchase an AM Stereo received from any mainstream source today. Not only do (ok, I'll give you there are a few) most people not care about AM Stereo, but most of them don't even know it exists.

But, hey, it if turned you on, and you have the receiver - enjoy! Just don't expect to get a lot of attention from it.
 
BIG APE said:
;D Mike, you happen to know the whereabouts of Jim Dunlap?
Click to expand...

Long time gone..... Passed away September 1999, but I have a feeling you know that.

Mike
 
AM Stereo

WZKY in Albemarle and WNMB in North Myrtle Beach are two of the best sounding AM stations I have ever heard! As Bill stated earlier, both are AM Stereo. I'm not just saying that because I used to work at WZKY.
 
In sports programming, such as NASCAR, I could hear absolutely no difference between WZKY and WSOC-FM. That's listening to one of those AM stereo radios that Chrysler was installing back in the early 90's. In music, I hardly noticed a difference between them and WABZ FM when ABZ was doing the SMN oldies format. That was partially due to WABZ's disaster of an audio chain, but live and local always sounds better than satellite.
 
As a fan of AM Stereo I must say that you should have heard a difference between WABZ and WSOC-FM given the greater fequency response of FM and lower signal to noise ratio. Then again there's allot of noise in a NASCAR race isn't there? That might not have been the best test!
 
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