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Interesting freq jump occurance

N

NightCourtFan

Guest
Yesterday I was driving home from work, going through Lavell and caught a station that I thought was local but after hearing the traffic report for highways and byways that are not from the area it got me curious as to wherer this station was coming from. Turns out it was WQYK out of Tampa Bay, Fl......Now I know they are not a 1 million watt station..so I was wondering how I could get it so crystal clear all the way to shamokin? Is it just one of freak( no pun) occurances thaqt happen sometimes with Radio waves?
 
I recieved a phone call when I was doing mornings at EMR from Wyoming-the state of. It was around 9am or so. Said we were crystal clear. Said a whole bunch of his friends were listening and rattled off the past 5 songs I'd play in a row. Knew it was the state of Wyoming and not the town of Wyoming as our signal was totally dead between WB and Scranton. Also, when I started at CDL, Walt Rube was CE..That was back in the day when his idea of fixing the transmitter was slap it along side a few times. He did the monthly freq check and got a DX postcard from Australia. The wildest, though, was when I was working in Lawton, Ok and whe had one of our hellacious thunderstorms (cloud ceiling 55,000 ft)-A Detroit FM on our freq completely wiped out our signal and came in like it was next door-and stayed that way for well over an hour-nobody could listen to us.
 
There are plenty of nights, about 365/year, when I can't get WNAK when I pull into our parking lot. All I can hear is a bunch of frogs north of the border drowning NAK out. Some nights it's even worse. I feel as if I'm in a French restaurant.
 
Back in my WARM days we had a number of steady listeners in The Bronx. One guy swore he could only get us on Sunday mornings. Why, I have zero idea. My best skip was getting a Houston, Texas, country FM in Nay Aug Park one hot summer day.

Then there was the time when the WARM news room was tossed into utter chaos because the scanners were screaming with chatter and dispatching to a major fire somewhere. It was big, big , big! It was also in Baltimore. Once, and seemingly only once that anyone could recall, Baltimore City FD's was booming into Avoca loud and clear.
 
I grew up in Morris County, NJ, and in the 60's, 70's, and even very early 80's, it was not unusual for anyone there to pick up WARM loud and clear. In fact I even logged WARD 1540 loud at my home there (just before I moved to NEPA and it became 1550). I can not remember that particular year but I want to say it was 1976.

I recall a major flood after a snowstorm that happened in the early 90's. I believe Harry West was still doing the morning show. I was stuck, literally in NJ at my parents house and aside from calls to my wife (stuck at home in NEPA, Wayne County), my only real connection to what was happening in my "new" home was WARM. I could hear it loud and clear over my car radio.

Because of the coverage WARM did, I decided, and quite rightly, to stay in Northern NJ until things cleared up a bit for my travel home.
The coverage was tight: I encountered everything reported.

I have heard 910 and 980 in Northern NNJ as well in the past. But we have two issues here: 1. In the case of WARM, a degraded broadcast system everyone on here knows about, and 2, the total degrading of the AM band alltogher, from outside noice to the fact it is overloaded with stations.

But that fact brings along another: that if AM radio is to survive, it will truly be a LOCAL service again........all of the facts, like HD being the same. And that, may be a very good thing.

It might be interesting to add that WARD, at 1540, and I believe at 1,000 watts ND, did a pretty good job coming in where just up the road, we had 10,000 watt WRAN blasting (albeit at 500 d watts at sunset), and that is the first place I played radio, so I know that install well.

Tropo on FM is getting silly: I've recently heard NC and SC FM stations here in NEPA........the further south the better it seems and the stations from Binghamton have taken a real beating in NEPA from that tropo.
Carl
 
Hey Norm,

Did the station you worked for in Lawton play a canned format like WGBI-FM, and when there were tornado warnings in the area they switched to Jazz? This was around 1978.
 
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