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Sudden influx of DX cards - from as far as ITALY..?? What the heck?? LOL

S

spinjector

I was wondering if anyone else with big-AM (~50kw) has had a recent increase in the number of DX-cards they receive from elsewhere on the planet?

This week I've received 3 by email from scandinavian countries - and 1 by snailmail from ITALY(!!!). o_O

I was amazed by the Italy one, and it's made me wonder if the solar weather has been unusually quiet lately, or if someone elsewhere on our carrier went off the air, or ... what. Maybe it's just a co-inky-dink.

I'm with WTEM 980-AM in DC (50kw). I used to be with WWKB 1520-AM in Buffalo (50kw), and we got a couple every month there. But here at WTEM I'm 10-degrees farther south than WWKB, and we've only gotten one or two since I started working here 8 months ago.
 
This is the time of year when DXers go on pilgrimages to that part of the world, string miles of wire across the frozen tundra & spend countless dark hours DXing. One picked up 4.6 watt WIFE 1580 Connersville,IN quite a number of years ago.
 
BobOnTheJob said:
This is the time of year when DXers go on pilgrimages to that part of the world, string miles of wire across the frozen tundra & spend countless dark hours DXing. One picked up 4.6 watt WIFE 1580 Connersville,IN quite a number of years ago.
Click to expand...

Yup. The Scandinavian ones are almost surely legit. The Italian one is almost certainly a fraud. Bellabarba and son have been pulling that scam for probably 20 years now.

http://www.schoechi.de/bellabar.html
 
Ha! I got to work today and checked the Dx card, and it is this Barbarella guy... LOL

I told our PD and showed him your link, and he's gonna milk it for all it's worth and send the guy back a fake reply card with something about our "1kw" stick and pictures of his college radio station... =-)
 
About 20 years ago, we did a DX test on the WV 1570 daytimer we owned at the time. Just about this time of year, partner ran a cart with tone, an ID and Christmas music. Quarter-wave tower fed with a kilowatt

Got a card from a DX-er in northern Sweden, he was using a "Marconi" type of long-wire antenna aimed towards the eastern US. As I recall, he lived on a peninsula near the Baltic Sea, did his DX'ing when he wasn't working at the local Volvo truck plant.
 
spinjector said:
Ha! I got to work today and checked the Dx card, and it is this Barbarella guy... LOL

I told our PD and showed him your link, and he's gonna milk it for all it's worth and send the guy back a fake reply card with something about our "1kw" stick and pictures of his college radio station... =-)
Click to expand...

Do some cut & paste from http://www.wvwa.com/ :D
 
KSL-AM (1160 KHz, 50 KW Omni) gets a few here and there. But, the old KUTR-AM (820, with some weird night time and Critical Hours pattern/power) used to get tons of QSLs from Scandinavia. We just could never make Provo (40 miles south)!

There's been a rash of MW AM DX loggings over the past few weeks, though. Check out the DX threads.
 
kenglish said:
KSL-AM (1160 KHz, 50 KW Omni) gets a few here and there. But, the old KUTR-AM (820, with some weird night time and Critical Hours pattern/power) used to get tons of QSLs from Scandinavia. We just could never make Provo (40 miles south)!
Click to expand...

I've heard some recordings of American stations, as made in Europe. What we think of as the big signals over here -- the 50kw non-directional clear-channel operations like KSL -- don't do so well over there.

I strongly suspect the reason is directional antennas. Stations like KUTR operate directionally (at least at night) so as to direct their power away from a co- or adjacent-channel American station that was there first.

The power that doesn't go into the null has to go *somewhere*. Often, that "somewhere" is out of the U.S. at the nearest -- usually Canadian -- border.

In other words, often the "smaller" stations have an "effective radiated power" in the direction of northern Europe that is substantially higher than 50kw.

If I recall properly, WWZN-1510 Boston is one of the loudest U.S. signals in Europe. Their directional pattern (http://www.fcc.gov/ftp/Bureaus/MB/Databases/AM_DA_patterns/606726-76435.pdf) favors the east. If my math is right, their effective radiated power in the direction of Glasgow, Scotland is more than 94,000 watts -- while their ERP towards Nashville is more like 40 watts...
 
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