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Funny DXing Stories

I don't have any funny DX stories, but this is my most bizarre one:

I was tuning through the 31 meter band on my shortwave radio one afternoon, probably in 1978 or '79, and I heard what sounded like a woman saying something like "mayday, mayday". She said "this is Radio Northsea International, our ship is on fire". She may or may not have said the ship was listing. Then she gave a phone number, and asked for anyone listening to call that number. I couldn't hear the number well. She repeated something about how many people were on board the ship (or something similar to that -- my reception was a bit grainy), and clearly said "help". Then the mystery station went off the air, and I heard nothing but static and splatter from adjacent SW stations.

I went to the telephone and called 911, and told them of my unusual reception of a call for help. The operator connected me to the Coast Guard or Air Force (can't remember which), where a guy took down the information and said he would contact the Air Force base in Rammstein, Germany. A few hours later I got a call back from a guy at the local Air Force base, and he said they had passed my info to various authorities over in Europe, but they weren't aware of any ship on fire or sinking.

I haven't been able to find any info on any RNI ship being on fire during the year in question. I don't believe they were even operating after '74, according to Wikipedia.

Apparently in 1971 there was an attack on their ship using some sort of explosive device. There is a transcript of what the DJ said at that time, some of which matches what I heard in 1978. Perhaps someone was playing a old recording of RNI's programming that day.

I still have the logging written in one of my old logbooks somewhere.

R. Nordzee International Wikipedia article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_North_Sea_International
 
Most interesting: Getting KTZZ Conrad, MT (93.7) and being able to ID it because it used the same satellite feed as local WWKR (94.1)
Strangest: Getting WJNR Iron Mountain (101.5) on 101.7 alongside local WMTE (101.5)
 
Ftballfan's post re: WJNR vs WMTE reminded me of an oddity I once experienced.

Several years ago I was in my back yard (a couple miles S of El Cajon, CA) one afternoon, checking out FM on my Panasonic RQ-SW20. That Panny isn't known for its ultra-sharp selectivity - generally the analog splash from FM signals is wide enough to pretty much mask its own IBOC noise. It's not so bad at keeping images & mixing products at bay, though it's no Tecsun. On AM it's just about as wide as a stock Sony SRF-M37W. Interestingly when close to an AM transmitter, it actually does BETTER than my Tecsuns at getting weak to medium signals elsewhere on the dial.

Well my SW20 has a local/DX switch on FM, and if fanaggled right can be set to an unmarked middle setting. I was on, I think, 100.1 FM, and heard what sounded like a food/cooking TV show. Interestingly it could only be heard on that middle setting of the lcl/dx switch. The strength was just below that necessary to trip the stereo decoder. Normally 100.1 is Christian Contemporary KLVJ from Julian, but practically unreceivable here.
I never heard any station IDs from it, but I did hear a mention of Tennessee a few times. I also didn't notice any other unusual propagation that day, either. I wonder what I may have heard, or why I only heard it on that setting?

Another one comes to mind from like 18+ years ago, but now I'm not so sure it's what I thought it might have been.
I was using a Zenith Royal 705 one morning, listening in the upper 800s or so, around 7am. KDXU 890 St George, UT (incidentally my first ever DX station, but on a different much less capable radio), had faded out due to daylight, and as I was tuning around there I thought I heard another voice from a news/talk station.
Puzzlingly, I think I heard a frequency in the low 1400s mentioned (don't remember which now) along with either VA or WV or somewhere near there. I never heard a call or city, though. I wonder what that anomaly might have been, or what could have caused it?

I also seem to remember someone posting about hearing one of their local stations on a chain-link fence - not by putting the radio on the fence, but the fence ITSELF was somehow demodulating the signal & playing the audio. I recently tried finding that post and couldn't find it, though. Maybe it's on a different radio forum / group I participate on?
 
I don't know if this qualifies as a DX story but here goes. As a kid growing up near a large city in the 60's, I would listen to 2 of my favorite top 40 stations on graveyard frequencies. I didn't know anything about DXing at the time, but I noticed that the 2 stations had background noise on some nights, but not on all nights. At the time, I thought the station had studio audiences, i.e., I thought the co-channel interference was the chattering of people in the studio.
 
One Friday during last summer, I had just talked to a guy I work with about how he had a relative that worked at a station in Miami, FL, as he was into radio just as much as I was (kind of hard to find people my age into the subject). Anyway, on my way home, I was bored scanning through the FM dial, and found nothing out of the ordinary until the car radio had stopped at 92.3. Being in Coffeyville, KS I was confused anyway, the nearest 92.3 is 25 miles north of Wichita. Sure enough, the call letters of WCMQ, A spanish station out of Miami, FL, showed up on the RDS of the car. Scanned the rest of the dial and found nothing else out of the ordinary. Thought it was weird how I had just talked to a guy about a station in Miami, and then received one minutes after.
 
not a funny story but....

First FM E-Skip - around age 10-12 i waited in the car while my father went into a store. I was tuning around the FM band when all of a sudden a 94.9 came in that I had never heard before. They were running ads for a business in Tallahassee FL. I was in a car in Burlington Massachusetts.

First TV E-Skip (analog) - early 2005 - local channel 4 was coming in with strange silhouette-ish over-image. I tuned to blank stations and actually got other stations. I grabbed my digital camera and tried to take screen shots. Nothing came out that well though. One was a Milwaukee station and one was a Chicago station. This was with rabbit ears on top of the tv indoors.
 
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