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Unwanted DX? Any instances where DX is more of a nuisance?

X

Xale57

Is there any normally received stations you enjoy that get interference during a tropo opening/eskip? In AM/FM/TV?

My location is Northeast NJ: In the past, I used to try and listen to semi local WFAS from White Plains when it was on 103.9. When WRCN Riverhead, NY was Rock, I used to get annoyed when it would slam WFAS during tropo. This was during the Summers of 2007-12/13.

In modern times, the only annoyance I'll have is hearing a song I like on semi local 100.7 WHUD but have WZXL from Wildwood, NJ interfering, during an opening.

What are stations you prefer to have left alone? or a song/talk show you want to hear and not the DX station?
 
Xale57 said:
Is there any normally received stations you enjoy that get interference during a tropo opening/eskip? In AM/FM/TV?

My location is Northeast NJ: In the past, I used to try and listen to semi local WFAS from White Plains when it was on 103.9. When WRCN Riverhead, NY was Rock, I used to get annoyed when it would slam WFAS during tropo. This was during the Summers of 2007-12/13.

In modern times, the only annoyance I'll have is hearing a song I like on semi local 100.7 WHUD but have WZXL from Wildwood, NJ interfering, during an opening.

What are stations you prefer to have left alone? or a song/talk show you want to hear and not the DX station?
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Thus far, my locals haven't been over-ridden that much here in Cheyenne, WY. There was an E-skip event in August 2020 where a station took over my local KRRR (Classic Hits from the 60s-80s), and I was mildly annoyed because that local is one of my favorites.

During tropo, Fort Collins signals will occasionally give way to Colorado Springs or beyond (example: KMAX vs KILO). In that case, I don't really have a preference. One time, 99.1 KUAD had their HD signal messed up by tropo, but the other station waa only audible for long enough to figure out that it was a different station. Otherwise, I kind of wasted that opportunity. Also, I really like 91.5 KUNC programming, and I'll even choose it over 91.9 KUWR, but when a strong tropo event caused KRNE's HD signal to lock over KUNC's analog signal, I missed out on the morning show. However, Inwas excited to Dx that far into Nebraska, so silver lining.

I think as so long as K206EO, KPAW, KXBG, KIGN, KRRR, and KXKL is not messed with, I'm a happy camper.

Although, there is a situation on 93.3 where KTCL and KMOR battle it out, but KTCL is way dominant here. I would rather have KMOR, so sometimes I wish for Panhandle tropo, LOL.
 
ZantennaG1 said:
Thus far, my locals haven't been over-ridden that much here in Cheyenne, WY. There was an E-skip event in August 2020 where a station took over my local KRRR (Classic Hits from the 60s-80s), and I was mildly annoyed because that local is one of my favorites.

During tropo, Fort Collins signals will occasionally give way to Colorado Springs or beyond (example: KMAX vs KILO). In that case, I don't really have a preference. One time, 99.1 KUAD had their HD signal messed up by tropo, but the other station waa only audible for long enough to figure out that it was a different station. Otherwise, I kind of wasted that opportunity. Also, I really like 91.5 KUNC programming, and I'll even choose it over 91.9 KUWR, but when a strong tropo event caused KRNE's HD signal to lock over KUNC's analog signal, I missed out on the morning show. However, Inwas excited to Dx that far into Nebraska, so silver lining.

I think as so long as K206EO, KPAW, KXBG, KIGN, KRRR, and KXKL is not messed with, I'm a happy camper.

Although, there is a situation on 93.3 where KTCL and KMOR battle it out, but KTCL is way dominant here. I would rather have KMOR, so sometimes I wish for Panhandle tropo, LOL.
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I had an Eskip event in Laramie that took out KUAD 99.1 and K262AI 100.3

When i lived in an area with more then 3 stations in a 50 mile radius, i didnt care.. i was especially pleased when DX wiped out a local.

On the reverse, a few months before i moved to laramie, WY.. i heard KCGY 95.1 in PA
 
The closest I can come to answering this one was coincidentally part of a discussion from a couple of weeks back. Before the days of bluetooth being common, I used to use an FM modulator to rebroadcast online streams, spotify playlists, etc. throughout the house or the place where we stay on vacation, At the latter location on the Gulf at the Alabama - Florida state line, I would set the modulator at `07.9, and at least once a week it would get trashed throughout the condo at least once a week by WPFM from Panama City, FL, about 100 miles away.
 
When pesty Spokane or Seattle tropo scatter mixes with E-skip during a fickle opening. Or, when two stations mix on E-skip, too unstable for RDS, and I hear "Today's best country, 95.5 K....." as another station piles in. But as Murphy's Law has it, as soon as the first steel guitar pick happens, the unid is back strong as it was before.
 
crainbebo said:
When pesty Spokane or Seattle tropo scatter mixes with E-skip during a fickle opening. Or, when two stations mix on E-skip, too unstable for RDS, and I hear "Today's best country, 95.5 K....." as another station piles in. But as Murphy's Law has it, as soon as the first steel guitar pick happens, the unid is back strong as it was before.
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Don't forget Portland lol I have the same problem here too though a strong enough opening will wipe out anything that isn't KWIQ or KDRM.
 
Yessir, Joe. I'm not an FM or TV DXer per se, but whenever there was something odd on NYC's Channel 2, I could sit entranced before the set for hours. That channel is an E-skip magnet.

One foggy morning in southeastern Nassau County on Long Island, well within Line-of-Sight to the Empire State Building tip, there was no WRFM 105.1 at all. Instead there was JB-105 from Providence, as though it were a few miles down Montauk Highway. I'm figuring it was tropo but am not well-versed in the difference between trope and E-skip.

But that was *wanted* DX.
Being near that NJ tower farm was an incedibly impossible region for AM DX. There are spurs and harmonics and incestual RF mixing and whistles which probably blanket the worst AM dial community on Earth. A DX buddy of mine moved to Manhattan's west side and gave up on AM DXing. He once joked that in order to hear WADO 1280, he first had to null out a WADO image.
Talk about unwanted DX.
 
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For me, it's WSCR and WGN. I don't listen to either of them over the air all that much anymore, but Cuba has always been a pest on 670 - though not as much as back in the 90s and early 2000s - and WGCR from North Carolina tends to wreck WGN in central Ohio at critical hours. One is licensed to do that, the other just doesn't care!
 
Back in the analog days (in Boise Idaho), we'd see PBS on Ch 3 pop up covering other DX and last all day.
"Great, Portalas (KENW) again." A pest in the summer E-skip.
 
joebtsflk1 said:
Unwanted DX, the bad old analog days: Channel 2. Amazing DX if there wasn't something you actually wanted to watch on the local station, but if there was, chances were that's when tropo or E-skip was going nuts.
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WBBM-TV, channel 2 in Chicago, used to put up slides explaining what was going on when tropo and e-skip events were happening. Before the days of cable, satellite, etc. I can remember our loczl channel two getting blown out by WESH-TV from Daytona Beach a few times.
 
cyberdad said:
WBBM-TV, channel 2 in Chicago, used to put up slides explaining what was going on when tropo and e-skip events were happening.
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That was nice of them to do. I'd imagine at one point most of the people who ran stations, and even the on-air anchors, probably had an inherent sense of how tropo and E-skip worked, and some even Dxed themselves, right? Now, they go in without that knowledge, it seems.
cyberdad said:
Before the days of cable, satellite, etc. I can remember our loczl channel two getting blown out by WESH-TV from Daytona Beach a few times.
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WESH was on 2? I have to wonder just how crowded analog was at the time.
 
WESH 2 and WEAR 3 were a couple of my earliest Sporadic E logs, back in the late 1960s. I remember seeing WESH, and thinking, well, WESH is not a word, must be the call letters! I miss analog DX.

WPBT 2 Miami also. I was surprised that a public TV station was on Channel 2.

I seem to remember KWGN 2 and KOA-TV 4 rolled in quite frequently also.

On FM, with an old Maganvox Stereo Theater, where I saw the TV DX, a giveaway for Sporadic E was the tuning meter rapidly bouncing around. At that time in the late 1960s, that was our only FM radio, so it was either TV or FM DX but not both. When I got a Sony Supersensitve, quite selective AM FM portable, that was when my serious FM DXing began.
 
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I think I mentioned elsewhere that my first experience with Sporadic E was in the late 1950s. I lived about 45 miles across the ridge of hills in SE Michigan, from WJBK-TV 2 and WWJ-TV 4, which were two of the half dozen strongest signals received. I would watch reruns of Lucy and children's shows in the early morning, and Indian Head test patterns would waft in and out, overwhelming the Grade B signals. In retrospect, they were out west in the Mountain Time Zone. It was perplexing and even somewhat disturbing, not knowing what it was for several more years. The channel knob sequence on the Zenith was theoretically designed to minimize knob turning in any given market area, 2,4,5,7,9,11,13,3,6,8,10,12, so it didn't work well for us, since we had 2,4,5,6,7, and 12. In any event, it skipped 3 without effort, so if there was anything coming in there, I probably missed it.

I saw my first VHF UHF tuner when I was 5 years old, and was fascinated with the little thumb UHF dial inside the big VHF dial, and had dreams a few years later of seeing signals on every single channel. Eventually it happened, more or less, between Toledo, Ft. Wayne and South Bend and other area stations on nearly every channel at times. Back then, there were few duplications within a couple hundred mile radius. There were a few times when WKAR-TV 23 East Lansing and WAKR-TV 23 Akron could both be seen some Summer nights by turning the T-45 rotator and Allied Colorset 60 antenna.
 
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Schroedingers Cat said:
WPBT 2 Miami also. I was surprised that a public TV station was on Channel 2.
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Boston, Miami, and the Twin Cities had public TV on Channel 2, as far as the big cities go. There were many others in smaller markets, including those on statewide networks.
 
Most DX is wanted, even if it overrides something else I might want to listen to. I can think of a few examples, though.
The Big 8 CKLW being thoroughly trashed by PJB Trans World Radio on 800. CKLW's went to night pattern anyway, but PJB killed what was next.
I grew up 50 miles south of Fort Wayne, IN and there was an occasion where Wheeling, WV totally overtook it. More recently, it wasn't DX as such, but we got just out of our market and we wanted to hear a news story on the local news/talker. A Kentucky station made it hard to do.
 
cyberdad said:
WBBM-TV, channel 2 in Chicago, used to put up slides explaining what was going on when tropo and e-skip events were happening. Before the days of cable, satellite, etc. I can remember our loczl channel two getting blown out by WESH-TV from Daytona Beach a few times.
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I remember that. It was even explained on the news one night. Might have been Bill Kurtis explaining why the picture and sound went crazy.

It seemed that every other year or so, there would be e-skip on New Year’s Day, when I was trying to watch the Cotton Bowl on WBBM.

Then again, one of my best catches was holding the rabbit ears on the Sony just so to get a WCBS audio ID along with warped WBBM video.
 
Schroedingers Cat said:
WESH 2 and WEAR 3 were a couple of my earliest Sporadic E logs, back in the late 1960s. I remember seeing WESH, and thinking, well, WESH is not a word, must be the call letters! I miss analog DX.

WPBT 2 Miami also. I was surprised that a public TV station was on Channel 2.

I seem to remember KWGN 2 and KOA-TV 4 rolled in quite frequently also.

On FM, with an old Maganvox Stereo Theater, where I saw the TV DX, a giveaway for Sporadic E was the tuning meter rapidly bouncing around. At that time in the late 1960s, that was our only FM radio, so it was either TV or FM DX but not both. When I got a Sony Supersensitve, quite selective AM FM portable, that was when my serious FM DXing began.
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WPBT was the last analog DX I received. I’d have to look but it was either on the general analog shutdown day or the last day of Nightlight transmission. I hauled out a 5-inch TV-FM portable my mom used and fiddled with it. In popped WPBT, a new station on its last analog day.
 
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