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MW Frequency of the Week - 1390 kHz

B

Buckeyes2001

What can you all get on 1390 AM?

Here in Vermilion, OH it is some slop from WDLW 1380/Lorain, OH (transmitter tower actually in Sheffield TWP, OH). Underneath the splatter is WNIO/Youngstown, OH with a rather weak signal. At night, however I get a graveyard-like mess of stations.
 
Far northwest suburbs of Chicago....

Day: WGCI (Chicago), fair-weak
Night: 1390 becomes a mess, but with WGCI on top more often than not.
 
cyberdad said:
Far northwest suburbs of Chicago....

Day: WGCI (Chicago), fair-weak
Night: 1390 becomes a mess, but with WGCI on top more often than not.
Click to expand...

Same with me down in the Oak Lawn area. I have been DX'ing 1390 in the last two weeks. With the antennae on my stereo rotated in the right direction, I get the same mess.
 
cyberdad said:
Far northwest suburbs of Chicago....

Day: WGCI (Chicago), fair-weak
Night: 1390 becomes a mess, but with WGCI on top more often than not.
Click to expand...

About the same thing here in the near north Chicago suburbs although the night signal of WGCI is weaker it's usually on top.
 
Day - IBOC, IBOC and more IBOC. (From KRKO)
Night - Ditto, except I can faintly get KWOD 1390 Salem OR in the null (Which is hard to null out). Before IBOC on KRKO started, it was a mix of KWOD and KJOX Yakima WA (now KBBO, and before KTCR) I only have two logged on this frequency - thanks KRKO! :(

-crainbebo
 
W. WA.: daytime just KRKO splatter.

Nighttime: ESPN Salem OR (KWOD -- I used to hear them all the time when they were still KSLM); KTCR / KUSA / KBBO Yakima (I heard them IDing as KUSA a couple weeks ago with political talk); and I also have KLGN Logan UT logged from within the past year (don't remember what the format was).
 
Cincinnati
Days, it would have to be a very weak WZZB in Seymour, IN...birthplace of John Mellencamp, although I just checked and there was a mix of weak signals.

At sunrise, I've heard WNIO from Youngstown OH, WMPO from Middleport OH.

Nights, I have heard WMER from Meridian MS. They are 100 watts at night and it was 10:30 PM in October, so they may have failed to switch from day power.
 
KLGN is a standards station. Good catch.

-crainbebo
 
KULP El Campo, TX rather weakly during the day with no sign of it at night. Nothing really to note at 1390. I have tried for XEOR Reynosa, TA several times but with no success.
 
In NW Indiana, I get WGRB Chicago during the day, but splatter at night, due to the directional pattern only covering Cook County, IL at night. BTW, 1390 Chicago hasn't been WGCI-AM in a few years. It was CC's decision to drop the call letters on the AM side, & only use them on the FM side.
 
Well, I was surprised when I looked it up. It's been WGRB longer than I thought---June of 2004. My personal best faux pas recently was when I was posting something that mentioned 1560 in New York and called it WQXR. Duh, they've been WQEW since 1992!

Back to the subject of 1390, here in East Texas near Tyler I can get a decent signal from KBEC Waxahachie (south of Dallas; pronounced "wawks-uh- HATCH-ee"). At night they're gone, and although the frequency is generally a jumble, KCRC from Enid OK makes it into here quite frequently.
 
Modern-day on 1390 in NE PA here, downstate WLAN Lancaster is it, albeit weakly. Right now, they're frippering away with talk.
Nighttimes we've gotten Syracuse and Arlington VA.

(WLAN's * FM * sister is a pretty dynamic listen on 96.9, if you like 15 minutes or so of whatever contemporary music is out there. Boy, are they wound up. Superior signal here, too)

* * * * * * *

For historical reference sake only , certainly not applied to actual DX life in 2013:
Daytime on 1390 from near Kennedy Airport in Queens NYC, it was WEOK Poughkeepsie atop, up the Hudson River. NYC local WBNX 1380 used to delight in smushing anything within range. A weaker WRIV 1390 from way out on Long Island was a murmuring steady if you looped that way.
Nighttimes was WFBL Syracuse and WEAM from D.C. Every so often, WCSC from SC would surface.
 
Sorry for the post-post delinquency :

@ Dave : On Long Island, we got 1390 Chicago as news radio, WNUS, and also as WYNR. They must have been one of the first news stations in the country .....
 
DXnCruise said:
Same with me down in the Oak Lawn area. I have been DX'ing 1390 in the last two weeks. With the antennae on my stereo rotated in the right direction, I get the same mess.
Click to expand...

First of all, my bad for not being up-to-date with the WGRB call letters. Sorry.

I take it, DXnCruise, that you've got WGRB nulled for your 1390 DXing. You're in the same neighborhood as their stick! Although, that said, they're highly directional at night (to the north).

Back in their WYNR days in the 1960s, the Chicago 1390 used to have a much better night signal up here in McHenry county than they do now. For that matter, they'd be easily audible via skywave at night just about anywhere in Wisconsin. Not any more. I'm not sure if this is because of a change in the nighttime pattern, or just the channel being more crowded. Or both!
 
cyberdad said:
Back in their WYNR days in the 1960s, the Chicago 1390 used to have a much better night signal up here in McHenry county than they do now.
Click to expand...

That's interesting, except that I remember hearing WYNR on more than one occasion in the Dallas area back around that time. It wasn't an especially strong signal, but clearly identifiable. Now I'm curious, and wondering if anyone knows whether their pattern threw any sort of power toward the south decades ago.
 
@ j d

An old National Radio Club night-pattern book from around 1970 shows Chicago's 1390 pattern (and Youngstown OH's) as decidedly a lot stricter than they're portrayed on the Radio Locator.

In that book, both stations show this big, ovoid, inflated balloon going unerringly north, with just a wee, negligible tuft of signal allowed to go south. Each station looks like a 2-dimension balloon with the knot tied to the south. The signal of 'WFMJ', the Youngstown calls at the time, was especially tight to the south, moreso that Chicago's was.

Seemingly left pretty much alone to do it's nighttime thing in the northeast was WFBL Syracuse. Perhaps WFBL had priority.
 
Steve Green NEPA said:
Sorry for the post-post delinquency :

@ Dave : On Long Island, we got 1390 Chicago as news radio, WNUS, and also as WYNR. They must have been one of the first news stations in the country .....
Click to expand...

WNUS was the first all news station in the US. XETRA (XTRA news) was the first, but located in Mexico even though they served much of Southern California.
 
South of El Cajon, CA, I get:
Day - XEKT Tecate, BCN, about 40 or so dBu on my Tecsuns.
Night - KLTX is also in there.

KLTX and XEKT are short-spaced on their frequency. For example, in Pacific Beach, CA, this is what's heard near midday on a Sony SRF-59.
I wonder if there are other short-spaced co-channels like that? (maybe that could be a topic for another thread sometime.)
 
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