Funny DXing Stories

[BostonRandy]

I was wondering if any of my fellow DXing enthusiasts have any funny or humorous stories to tell?


Back in 2009, I was DXing on the back deck on a warm July morning (w/o headphones) when I received CFRK "92.3 Fred-FM" from Fredericton, New Brunswick. On my second pass through the dial, I came up on it again and, at that time, my wife stepped out on to the deck to check out what was up.

The announcer was giving the weather report which included "today's high of 16 and a low of 10". The first thing out of my wife's mouth was "What idiot is reading that??". I said nothing, shrugged my shoulders and said "everyone makes mistakes" without disclosing where the broadcast was coming from.

Later that night, I was patrolling the propagation maps when she walked into my office. I happened to be looking at New England and the Maritimes. I guess something clicked when she asked "Why don't they use Fahrenheit in Canada?"

Now THERE was a question I could not answer.

 

[nd2023]

An e-skip opening in 2010 caused me to miss a date with a girl because I lost track of time and the e-skip cloud stayed for a long time. That relationship ended.

July 24, the day of the monster e-skip opening, I was out with a friend in the afternoon. Knowing there was e-skip in the morning to Florida, it was likely that the e-skip would return. I kept looking at DX World, and sure enough, an e-skip cloud appeared. I had my portable HD radio with me, but we were inside. I told him that I wanted to go home. He thought something was wrong with me. Then we got in the car and noticed that all his FM presets were "static". I explained to him what e-skip was, and I DXed on his car radio till I got home to my DX setup.

I was on my college station in the summer of 2007, before our signal upgrade. E-skip took over the air monitor in the studio, just 2 miles from the transmitter. Since the air monitor also fed the stream, that meant nobody could listen to my show. So I turned off the transmitter and DXed from my car radio.

 

[Steve Green NEPA]

Maybe not a genuine 'DX' tale, but it's related.

I put a new AM-FM-Casette unit into my car one day, and drove off to pick up my girlfriend and cruise around a bit.

So we're listening to this FM Top 40 station, and she is enjoying the songs, and is somewhat surprised that it's coming in from maybe 120 miles away. 'This gets some pretty good reception,' I told her. 'And it's February. A lot of times there's terrific FM and TV reception in February.'

Then she does a double-take when the station runs a contest, asking listeners to write down all the Beatles songs they hear 'until November'.

'November ?!?' she says.

I got her there for a few seconds. Then, I pushed the eject button and out pops the casette I had been playing all the while -- a full 90-minute untelescoped air check I fiendishly had synchronized with our cruise. I even had put the dial indicator on the right frequency.

 

[Lawppy]

I was on the road with a friend and her two boys, 9 and 6, during the July 24th Es opening. All stations, even locals, were rendered useless. So I finally settled on 104.5 and heard a CHR-popish station with a very strong signal. We left it here. I knew it was Es, but also knew that she wouldn't understand what was going on even if I told her. The station ended up being from Beaumont, TX. Something that the 9 year old picked up on. He said 'Texas is like 2000 miles away! How are you doing this?' It flew right over his mom's head.

 

[w9wi]

When I was about 12, our church got a new pastor. Somehow, he got wind one of his younger parishioners was a radio tech geek. He had an old TV that didn't quite work, and offered it to me if I could get it fixed.

With a surprisingly small amount of help from Dad, I got it going. (the filament of *one side* of a double-diode tube had failed -- the other side was still working -- and there was a physically intermittent screen-to-control-grid short in the horizontal output tube. Which we fixed (temporarily) by inadvertently *dropping* the tube...) With no antenna in the basement, we couldn't receive any stations though.

So we brought it upstairs & hooked up a few feet of wire for an antenna. Turned it back on. There was channel 4 with a beautiful signal. And channel 6, and channel 10, and channel 12, and channel 2.

Channel 2? There's no channel 2 in Milwaukee.... But there it was, with a beautiful signal. And a guy trying to host a game of TV Bingo -- but warning the viewers playing that they'd probably have a hard time getting through on the phone, the lines were jammed with curious callers from the United States. (??, sounds like this announcer thinks folks in the U.S. are foreigners??)

Turns out it was CKCK-TV in Regina. My young introduction to sporadic-E.....

 

[Steve Green NEPA]

Two more tales of The Loop -- a couple of good Yogi-Berra lines :

Two great DX buddies drove up to visit for my birthday (the Big 4-6) and brought along a gift -- a GE Superadio II.
At the time, I was living in a town located in a geological volcanic hole. This house now is 1540' above sea level, while the apartment where my friends visited was only 750'.
After I had done some preliminary fiddles witht the radio -- I'm basically strict-AM -- Vinny asks to give it a spin, like it's some portable Corvette. He's whirling the FM antenna back and forth with slow and intent precision, like some Geneva watchmaker.
Only two stations come in.
WAVT 101.9 and WMGH 105.5.
'What a great place to DX!,' he says, eyes wide in glee. 'Nothing comes in!'

* * * * * *

Girlfriend and I are driving around Long Island. I had initiated her into the realm of DX somewhat, and she knew some of the call letters, frequencies and tower sites.
Coming up out the windshield is the sight of a familiar tower on the Long Island Expressway, located in the town of Brentwood. It's the tower of a station originally with studios in Huntington, and then having moved to Melville.
'Well, there it is,' she observes, nodding at the tower. 'WCTO. Smithtown.'

 

[rew]

Our station in Alabama had just done an upgrade from a class A to a C3 and we had a great signal in our city of license. We were doing a remote at a local business. We had a big PA system set up on the street being fed from the stations remote van. I always try to get the onair signal from the radio in the van, It just seems to pick up real good. In the middle of the remote the announcer on site comes in and tells me that we are not picking the station up on the PA . I check it and it is just noise. I dial up the transmitter thinking it has gone down but all checks fine. In a few seconds I hear our signal starting to come back and suddenly it is covered with a station ID and spanish programming coming out of southern Texas. This lasted about 15 minutes and all went back to normal. I just put a CD on the PA till our signal came back on.

 

[Cincinnati Kid]

Two guys from the University of Cincinnati radio station that I know were driving to Tulsa during the day in October, 1967 to broadcast the Cincinnati-Tulsa football game. At one point far into the trip, they passed a radio antenna that was near the highway. In attempting to tune in that station, one of them started dialing across the AM band. When a station came booming over the car radio, it appeared they had found that station. However, they then heard an announcer say, "This is WCKY...Cincinnati". This was some 650 miles from Cincinnati and during the day.

 

[tomservo]

I can't help but wonder if the event that rew described is what happened to me in this story:

Back when I had a long commute across Birmingham to an industrial job on the east side of town, I used to listen to WYDE out of Cullman on a regular basis. The signal was very choppy and unreliable on the interstate I drove because a few iron ore-rich mountains stood between me and the station's TX, about 50 miles to the north.

On this date, it wasn't just choppy, it was incredibly noisy and there was bleed over from a station one click over. The radio hosts were mentioning that people were calling in with reception issues on this day, so I started to tune around. The station one channel over was Spanish music! I continued to scan the dial as I inched closer to work and it was just absolutely crazy alive with DX, all from south Texas and Monterrey, Mexico. When I got to work, I pulled out my boombox and turned it on and even inside the big metal building, one of the Spanish music stations I heard earlier was strong as a local. So I called over the Mexicans I worked with and said, "Hey, you guys have a station from Mexico coming in well today!" They were in awe, and wound up listening to it for the next hour or so as it slowly faded out.

It was like a little taste of home for them, I guess. I tried to explain how it happened but the language barrier kinda kept that from happening.

 

[cyberdad]

One spring day about 15 years ago, I was driving from Toronto to London, Ontario on the 401 freeway. I had heard on a national news report that there was severe weather expected back home in Northern Illinois. On a lark, I checked out 780 on the rental car radio. This was at about 10:30am Eastern time midway between the two cities which are about 115 miles apart.

Sure enough, WBBM was there with a weak but clearly audible signal. And shortly after I tuned in the broadcast a warning that a line of severe storms was approaching an area where our home is located. I knew my wife wouldn't have the TV or radio on, but I was able to call her on my cell phone and relay the warning. Thanks to some unexpected daytime skywave.

Of course this was "back in the day" before smartphones with weather apps. As it turned out, the storms roared through about fifteen minutes after my call, but fortunately there was no damage or other adverse effect.

 

[FreddyE1977]

I was sitting around my apartment in Michigan with my JVC boombox in the late 1980's
when I picked up KJ 97 FM from San Antonio, Texas.

I called the station and asked the girl who answered "Is this KJ 97?" She answered
"yes".

"Do you play country music?" Again she answered "Yes, we do".

"Are you in San Antonio Texas?" She replied "Yes, we are."

"Well, I'm listening to your station right now. Just one thing though.
I am currently about 15 miles from Flint, Michigan".

This caused her to get very excited and start babbling incoherently.
She transferred me to their Chief Engineer who told me this skip was some type
of record for them. Then he sent me a fistful of bumper stickers. Oddly enough,
I knew a lady who moved there from San Antonio, and KJ 97 had been her favorite station.
She was happy to take the stickers from me.

 

[Schroedingers Cat]

Flint used to be a pretty good place to DX on FM. There were only two commercial locals for a long time, what is now WWCK-FM 105.5 and what is now WCRZ 107.9. There was/is WFBE 95.1, but it was owned by the Flint Board of Education and operated for many years only during the daytime or until maybe 8 PM sometimes, and was off in the summer. They kept the historical call letters when they were sold and went commercial, and they are now owned by Cumulus. But even with a 1960s Magnavox Stereo Theater, you could get FMs from at least four markets on a regular basis. Sporadic E would capture almost all the nearby market stations. The same was true for TV, as the only local transmitter was WJRT-TV 12, some 25 miles away. WJBK-TV 2 and then WWJ-TV 4 were often overwhelmed by Sporadic E. When I was really young, I would get Sporadic E on 2 and 4 and wonder what was happening. Sometimes another picture on the same offset would literally float through the local picture, along with lots of Indian Head Test Patterns fading in and out with cochannel lines. I really miss cochannel lines and Indian Head Test Patterns.

My advice is to never miss a date (or work or any other obligation) for DXing, unless you at least call and explain why you will be late, if that is even an option.

 

[EddieTheRapFan]

I don't know if it counts, but one night in 2007 I couldn't sleep, so I grabbed my pocket radio and started looking for something to listen on shortwave. I found WEWN from Irondale, Alabama, playing a Spanish programme recorded in the city of San Miguel... which is right next to my city, here in Buenos Aires! They had a show called "The Power of Love", where they had a Spanish priest playing records from artists like Azul Azul, Rodrigo, Soledad, Xuxa, Natalia Oreiro and others, and telling the audience the satanic messages the songs had on them, including a bizarre hidden message on a Xuxa song: "When I give you the number, when I give you the number, pray for him! Pray for angel Tony, yes sir! When I give you the number. Stop, stop!". Very scary, specially at that time!

 

[rbrucecarter5]

Early one morning in Dallas, I nulled KRLD 1080 and was able to get KNX, Los Angeles very clearly. This was prior to KRLD fooling around with HD hash. I heard about a major fatality on a freeway in LA. As it happens, our family was flying out to LA that morning so my daughter could do some filming. When I landed, I remembered the traffic report from hours before. KNX has a regular schedule of traffic reports, and as luck would have it, I needed to choose a route before their next report would be aired. Just to be on the safe side, I went a different way - and sure enough that freeway was still closed due to the fatality! If I hadn't heard the other report while still in Dallas, my daughter would have missed her call time. There is no "late" to call times (or auditions), so DX saved my daughter's job that day!

 

[crainbebo]

No funny stories here- maybe my "happy dance" when I logged KWKH 1130-LA in early 2010 here in WA (1800 miles) may count...

-crainbebo

 

[tomservo]

I don't know if it counts, but one night in 2007 I couldn't sleep, so I grabbed my pocket radio and started looking for something to listen on shortwave. I found WEWN from Irondale, Alabama, playing a Spanish programme recorded in the city of San Miguel... which is right next to my city, here in Buenos Aires! They had a show called "The Power of Love", where they had a Spanish priest playing records from artists like Azul Azul, Rodrigo, Soledad, Xuxa, Natalia Oreiro and others, and telling the audience the satanic messages the songs had on them, including a bizarre hidden message on a Xuxa song: "When I give you the number, when I give you the number, pray for him! Pray for angel Tony, yes sir! When I give you the number. Stop, stop!". Very scary, specially at that time!

I used to commute through Irondale on a daily basis. The shortwave array was out in the country but not too far from the city limits of Vandiver, the next county over. When WEWN first came on I took a shortwave down the highway with me and actually barely heard the station. Funny to think how powerful they are but I couldn't hear them so close to the transmitter site, yet their programs can be heard on the other side of the planet!

It wasn't until I moved about 250 miles out of Birmingham that I finally got to hear just how extensive WEWN's broadcasts on shortwave were. Being so close, I couldn't really hear anything but their high band (13 or 11 metres, I forget which) broadcasts.

 

[FreddyE1977]

Flint used to be a pretty good place to DX on FM. There were only two commercial locals for a long time, what is now WWCK-FM 105.5 and what is now WCRZ 107.9. There was/is WFBE 95.1, but it was owned by the Flint Board of Education and operated for many years only during the daytime or until maybe 8 PM sometimes, and was off in the summer. They kept the historical call letters when they were sold and went commercial, and they are now owned by Cumulus. But even with a 1960s Magnavox Stereo Theater, you could get FMs from at least four markets on a regular basis. Sporadic E would capture almost all the nearby market stations. The same was true for TV, as the only local transmitter was WJRT-TV 12, some 25 miles away. WJBK-TV 2 and then WWJ-TV 4 were often overwhelmed by Sporadic E. When I was really young, I would get Sporadic E on 2 and 4 and wonder what was happening. Sometimes another picture on the same offset would literally float through the local picture, along with lots of Indian Head Test Patterns fading in and out with cochannel lines. I really miss cochannel lines and Indian Head Test Patterns.

My advice is to never miss a date (or work or any other obligation) for DXing, unless you at least call and explain why you will be late, if that is even an option.

Lived there in the late 80's/early 90's. WFBE was still owned by the school board but had a more complete schedule.
Seemed to be a Texas bug in my e-skip there. I had also picked-up TV stations from Austin and College Station, TX.

I know what you mean about that co-channel interference. Experienced that regularly when I lived in southern Michigan
where channel 13's from Grand Rapids and Toledo would slug it out for supremacy.

Says it all about Flint that their top-rated station, WCRZ, bills itself as CARS 108.
"While you're cranking out the Buicks, We're cranking out the HITS!"

 

[charlestondxman]

For me, it would be when I was a freshman in HS. I was coming back from a quiz bowl tournament in Georgia (I believe Athens), and we were driving on two-lane US 78 from Athens toward Augusta. We couldn't find anything on the FM dial, so we looked for something on AM.

The first thing I found was WLS out of Chicago with Notre Dame football. It was late-aftermoon, so It was near the top of the hour, so we heard their distinctive TOH jingle. The other people in the minivan were amazed.

 

[cd637299]

I was about 8 years old, 1967 or 1968....Miami's WTHS ch 2 was only on air in the evenings during summer vacation from school.

One afternoon about 4:30 pm came on an animated commercial, "I Wish I Were an Oscar Mayer Wiener"....in Spanish! (Miami had yet to get Spanish TV outside of brief news reports from Manolo Reyes & maybe others.)

Mom & I were awestruck. The picture was pretty keen. All I remember seeing close to an ID was "Telemundo San Juan." (Natch it was WKAQ-TV, I learned later on.)

I asked Mom what the call letters might be; she said "I don't think they usecall letters [in San Juan]."

That might have been my first taste of sporadic-E; if not the first, it had to be the most notable from the 60s.

cd

 

[cyberdad]

er. When WEWN first came on I took a shortwave down the highway with me and actually barely heard the station. Funny to think how powerful they are but I couldn't hear them so close to the transmitter site, yet their programs can be heard on the other side of the planet!

Reminds me a little of the hotel where I used to stay in suburban Toronto. Basically a mile or so down the road from CFRB/CFRX towers. CFRB would bleed all over the radio from 1010, while CFRX was barely audible on 6070. Definitely weaker than back home in the Chicago area.