PERU In Alaska!

[SomeRadioGuy]

Happened at 0727UTC Sat Aug 10 and I'll be real honest, I about s^%t myself.

Signal was.. surprisingly damn good, heard copious mentions of Radio Santa Rosa.. well as clear as the hummariffic off frequency transmitter can be.

First ever south american AM heard by me ever anywhere.. 6640 miles, 18kw on 1500khz

 

[crainbebo]

Let's gooooo!! Nicely done Paul! Radio Santa Rosa has been heard along the west coast as well, but mostly as bits and pieces with their off-frequency carrier.
Could Ecuador be next? Or Colombia?

 

[SomeRadioGuy]

Let's gooooo!! Nicely done Paul! Radio Santa Rosa has been heard along the west coast as well, but mostly as bits and pieces with their off-frequency carrier.
Could Ecuador be next? Or Colombia?

I wouldnt say it was blowing the doors off, but it was good for 15-20 minutes.

No idea whats next, but we'll see

 

[davideduardo]

Let's gooooo!! Nicely done Paul! Radio Santa Rosa has been heard along the west coast as well, but mostly as bits and pieces with their off-frequency carrier.
Could Ecuador be next? Or Colombia?

Great catch.

Get them while they are still alive. In the Andean nations, there is no valid economic reason to sustain a SW station any more.

While it was sidelined due to the pandemic and an economic crisis, I was working on a project that involved streaming a variety of "popular" radio formats in Spanish, Quechua and Aymara to smartphones as part of an app that included financial in-place-of-banks services and an interface with government things like social security and schools.

The system is modeled after that used in many Sub-Saharan African nations where people get their pay "check" on their phone and use the credits to buy at stores and services. Some that we examined also have very simple and well prepared highly illustrated lessons in how to use and manage your money.

Since most people outside the larger cities in the Andean zone never had home landlines, they moved easily to the portability of cellular devices and were able to use pay-as-you-go services. We believed that in Bolivia such an audio service would totally replace radio, particularly if the commercial content were limited to under 5 minutes an hour.

 

[crainbebo]

It's an AM station! Not on shortwave! Which makes this even more impressive.

 

[davideduardo]

It's an AM station! Not on shortwave! Which makes this even more impressive.

Yep, I missed that. In some places in Latin America, AM (Medium Wave... Short Wave is AM, too) is virtually dead. El Salvador, for example, has nearly no commercial AMs left. The few that remain on the air are religious. Where I owned AMs, Ecuador, in Quito there are less than 10 now on the air out of over 30 that once existed.

It is similar in every part of Latin America, with only Argentina still having a good number of successful AMs in the larger 20 or so markets..

I recall my first catch of an Ecuadorian station from Cleveland before I moved there: Radio Ecuatoriana, 3 kw on 855. I also heard 995, 870, and a couple of others. Back then, few AMs there had towers and used wire "T" or "Inverted L" antennas strung between a couple of phone poles or trees.

 

[SomeRadioGuy]

It's an AM station! Not on shortwave! Which makes this even more impressive.

I've heard a peruvian commercial SW outlet too, Radio Tarma on 4775..very well, way better than youd expect

 

[sat2000]

Here's a recording of OBX4I R Sta. Rosa, Lima, made on 6th Aug. 1995, 03:31 UTC, from QTH Stuttgart. Equipment was a GRUNDIG Satellit 2000 portable world band receiver with KIWA Loop Antenna and QRM Eliminator. Distance to the location in Germany 6.670 mi. Transmitter power in 1995 was acc. to WRTH 10 kW.

That night WTOP didn't came through, and with the loop antenna in the right direction it was possible to catch it. ID at 0:05 in MP3.

 

[Identnut]

Yep, I missed that. In some places in Latin America, AM (Medium Wave... Short Wave is AM, too) is virtually dead. El Salvador, for example, has nearly no commercial AMs left. The few that remain on the air are religious. Where I owned AMs, Ecuador, in Quito there are less than 10 now on the air out of over 30 that once existed.

It is similar in every part of Latin America, with only Argentina still having a good number of successful AMs in the larger 20 or so markets..

I recall my first catch of an Ecuadorian station from Cleveland before I moved there: Radio Ecuatoriana, 3 kw on 855. I also heard 995, 870, and a couple of others. Back then, few AMs there had towers and used wire "T" or "Inverted L" antennas strung between a couple of phone poles or trees.

A large part of AMs in Peru are grandfathered simulcasts of their more popular FM sisters. Lima's Panamericana simulcasts on 960 AM, I take it because that was the original frequency... but everybody gets their salsa fix on 101.1.

You would think Peru would use their AMs for non-commercial community formats like Mexico does, though, given how many indigenous languages are spoken there.