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longest aircheck
- Thread starter bobdavcav
- Start date
3 hours of Radio Voz Missionaria on 9665khz from Brazil, here in Alaska a few days ago. 10kw beamed at 40 degrees from their TX Site in Brazil.
In the earlier 60's from Cleveland, Ohio, I would record HJED-820 from the Midnight CST sign of of Dallas/Fort Worth until about 4 AM EST when my 3-hour reels ran out. HJED had an overnight trucker's show called "Una Voz en el Camino" (A voice on the road) with great music and I'd listen while I did my homework each evening.
About two-thirds of the nights the signal was good enough to be listenable and enjoyable. 50 kw, directional straight at me!
A true "in house" aircheck that a PD might review with talent would only record when the mic was open. No music, spots, news, etc. A three hour airshift on a music station might use up just 10 minutes or less of a tape, depending on whether the station did things like PSAs and live spots. What's being described here is not really an aircheck but, instead, just a tape of a full radio show or part of it.
I've just been going through and digitizing some of the airchecks (using the term in the broad sense; really just a full recording of a station over a period of time) I recorded when I lived in Chicago. I recorded them on Hi-Fi VHS tapes at EP speed which, with a T-160 tape, allows up to 8 hours and about 10 minutes of recording, in stereo, with better-than-FM fidelity. T-120s allow about 6 hours and 8 minutes. To keep file sizes at least somewhat manageable, I split the digital files of those tapes up into 3 or 4 hour segments. Stations recorded included WGCI, WGN (both AM stations in stereo); WLUP, WPNA(AM), WXRT, WBBM-FM, and WYSY-FM (just before it became WLEY). Notably, I had recorded WXRT's 25th anniversary broadcast, the last two broadcasts of WBEZ's "Metropolis" (an arts and variety show on Saturdays, including the "Annoying Music Show") as well as the final broadcast of AM time-share station WEDC just before it was absorbed into WSBC. I now have them in digital form.
Some of the tapes, unfortunately, had deteriorated to varying degrees, mostly consisting of ticks and pops which I could remove (mostly) with digital tools. This was especially true of Maxell tapes; Fuji tapes held up much better.
Added: I also digitized the legendary Al Hart's last day on San Francisco's KCBS(AM) in June 2000, also recorded on a Hi-Fi VCR tape (6+ hours).
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Deleted member 108832
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I have old cassettes full of airchecks from all over Texas, but the longest non-stop recording would have to be the last 6 hours of KKZR "Z-Rock" 106.9 Conroe recorded from March 10, 1995, leading up to the carrier being cut at 10pm, directly before Salem's "The Word" launched on the frequency. All recorded on Sony 60 minute cassette tapes. The only audio from that 6 hour run that is missing would be the :30 or so it took for me to eject, flip, and punch record when changing sides or decks. I had just turned 24 and was working in Houston when that happened.
I hate listening to those airchecks on collector sites. Even with imaging in but commercials cut, a fully scoped hour is between 4 and 10 minutes.
KTRH recorded all live hours on C-120s. I still have a few of them; reporters were allowed to re-use them once those recordings no longer served their purpose. In addition to talent reviews, they were useful for award submissions, particularly for spot news.
a portable digital recorder or a computer
My Tascam recorders can record a maximum length of 3 hours, 22 minutes, and 48 seconds when recording a 16-bit WAV file. If the recording goes over that length, the recorder automatically starts a new file. The files, which are sequentially numbered, can then be stitched together in an editing program such as Audacity. I haven't tried having a very long recording session direct to MP3; it's possible that such a recording could be done in one file. I usually use WAV so that I can do post-editing without worrying about introducing compression artifacts.
Large WAV files can be hard to handle: Audacity can't output more than about 4 hours and 15 minutes in such a file, but then I just convert it to FLAC (lossless compression) which usually gets around the problem and saves about 50-55% of the disk space, which is desirable anyway.
I'd have to look to see when it last rebooted, but my logger recorder at WDKX has been "airchecking" the station nonstop for at least three full years.
(I forget how often it overwrites, but there's at least a couple of months stored at any given time on the hard drive.)
The one and only time I accidentally left one of my Witness recorders behind in a hotel room, I got about 9 hours of WHBC-FM in Canton, Ohio before the battery died. I have a better system now to make sure everything's accounted for before I check out.
(I forget how often it overwrites, but there's at least a couple of months stored at any given time on the hard drive.)
The one and only time I accidentally left one of my Witness recorders behind in a hotel room, I got about 9 hours of WHBC-FM in Canton, Ohio before the battery died. I have a better system now to make sure everything's accounted for before I check out.
You wouldn't happen to still have any of those recordings? There's a real shortage of airchecks of (small-c) clear channel trucker overnight shows recorded before it all went to Sirius/XM. I would spend late nights in the 1990s listening to the programs on WWVA and WWL.
In terms of actually recording to cassette, I'd guess the longest one could go with no interruptions is around 8-10 hours using a VHS tape on SLP speed. In terms of recording with a computer, the sky's the limit.
In the very early 60's I'd tape a trucker's show every night and listen to it the next day while doing my Junior Hi homework!
Since I only got into this recently, any airchecks I've recorded in the past are relatively few and fairly short and fragmentary, almost incidental (I recorded them mostly for listening later, not historical preservation. In retrospect, I kinda wish I had because those stations I enjoyed so much either no longer exist or flipped to talk or religion, and airchecks of them by others seem relatively few and far between).
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I had no idea that this type of show existed outside of the US/Canada either! But I guess the old adage "If you got it, a truck brought it" holds true anywhere on the planet.
There exists on archive.org an aircheck of BBC Radio 2 recorded continuously over an entire weekend - 62 hours I think - on the 75th anniversary of VE Day and coincidentally at the time of peak COVID. That's probably the longest continuous uninterrupted aircheck that I know of as being available in one large file. It's definitely the longest aircheck I've listened to in its entirety, though not in one sitting of course.
We've ALL started like that.
I started recording streams so I could take stations I liked with me when I didn't have internet access, but would get tired of the same thing after a couple weeks so deleted most of those. I didn't start actually keeping stuff until 2012, and the first of those were only 15 minutes each because I just happened to have a bunch of cassettes lying around that didn't have anything I wanted on them. My first strategy was to actually get as much material for tophour.com as possible, but I haven't managed to submit anything to that site yet. I have yet to try recording lengthy airchecks with Audacity on my current computer as my hard drive is roughly 80% full currently, so I'm not sure how much I can actually get at this point. The longest aircheck I currently have available for trade is 112 minutes, though I do have one that I'm not sure if I'm going to keep or not that runs almost 7 hours.
There are several six-hour airchecks on Archive-dot-org, recorded by the late Bay Area engineer Mike Schweizer.
Mike started out recording on reel-to-reel as a teenager and, in the 80s, began recording on VHS tape in LP mode.
Mike started out recording on reel-to-reel as a teenager and, in the 80s, began recording on VHS tape in LP mode.
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