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E Skip Question

D

dlf1

I was sitting in traffic on 410 in San Antonio and listening to WQUT from Johnson City, TN; not a bad catch from San Antonio.

Then another station started fuming it out and that turned out to be KSSS GM from Bismarck, ND.

Is it common during E Skip to have two stations from entirely different parts of the country battling?

For some reason, I was thinking E Skip was more reguonalized: example 101.5 in Johnson City and Atlanta would fight it out.

I was pulling in a lot of Iowa and Minnesota FM’s as well; WQUT surprised me. Good Classic Rock stations by the way.
 
Yes, two different skip clouds were strengthened up to FM at that point. You were getting IA from one cloud and TN from another. Happens once in a while, not usually however!
 
I picked up 96.1, "Oklahoma's Classic Country, KXY," about 3 p.m. EDT Friday just south of Granville, Ohio. It was strong enough to stop the scan.
 
It's interesting to watch a signal strength indicator while hearing E Skip on the FM BCB. Stations can return near inverse field strength. Consider that a 100 kW FM has an inverse field of 1380 mV/m @ 1 mile. A slant distance E Skip inverse field can reach a maximum close to 1 mV/m. On a set without a fast tight AGC, you can watch the pin bounce irregularly with varying peaks and valleys in the signal strength. Tropospheric reflection is quite steady or with slow variation. It's very indicative of what type of DX Skip you have.
 
Once in a while, Es is so strong that I'm able to hear the IBOC hash on at least one side of a skip signal. Case in point, I have heard KBZT 94.9 San Diego putting off HD hash on 95.1...975 miles away from San Diego. Based off experience, San Diego and Phoenix openings are usually stronger than any other part of the U.S. that I hear on skip. I guess it helps that the signal isn't bouncing off 14,000 foot peaks in the Rockies.
KXXY 96.1 OKC has been logged here - Oklahoma City is over 1,400 miles away from Yakima.
 
I'm pretty sure it's my second-farthest FM catch ever. Over 10 years ago and actually not far from where I heard this station yesterday, I caught an FM station from North or South Dakota. I can't remember the station. Posted about it here but I can't find the post on Google.
I generally am not an FM DXer. I just happened to be scanning the dial and there was KXXY. With all the summer storms rolling through the Midwest, maybe I ought to try again.
 
I've had some random Es the last couple of days. One day it only got to 88.1. I had "Froggy 98" in Lincoln, NE on 98.1 yesterday from Sevierville TN
 
Schroedingers Cat said:
Stations can return near inverse field strength.
Click to expand...
So, do you mean that if the station produces 1v/m at the height of its antenna at one mile,
then it can produce up to 1 mv/m at 1000 miles assuming a 100% reflecting ionosphere,
and up to about 4uv/m on the moon, (if I did my math correctly)?
 
dlf1 said:
I was sitting in traffic on 410 in San Antonio and listening to WQUT from Johnson City, TN; not a bad catch from San Antonio.

Then another station started fuming it out and that turned out to be KSSS GM from Bismarck, ND.

Is it common during E Skip to have two stations from entirely different parts of the country battling?

For some reason, I was thinking E Skip was more reguonalized: example 101.5 in Johnson City and Atlanta would fight it out.

I was pulling in a lot of Iowa and Minnesota FM’s as well; WQUT surprised me. Good Classic Rock stations by the way.
Click to expand...

The first time I ever heard E-skip (I was in Philadelphia suburbs) the catch was KLJC in Kansas City. Exactly an hour later it was KDCR in Sioux Center Iowa (western IA near SD); two hours after that I caught a CBC French-language station that was fading in and out so fast that I couldn't catch the ID but judging from the Bruce Elving books I concluded it must have been CBEA in Red Lake Ontario. Plotting on a map this would be consistent with an inversion moving north, first bringing KC then Iowa then Ontario.

Have also caught (sort of) multiple regions from E-skip on TV2. I recall watching WPBT Miami from my home in east central Vermont until it went off the air, at which point WBRZ from Baton Rouge took over.
 
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