What Is The Furthest DX or E-skip Have You Ever Received?

[NO DAG]

I knew the channels were not local when the weather was saying sunny and 80 in the middle of January,, I was renting a house that had a high elevation, and I fixed the outdoor antenna and rigged up an amp. Had the antenna aimed SSW to pull in all the Albany stations, and the translators to the Burlington TV stations. The skips were regular occurances.

 

[chitchatjf]

Not too much here but I remember listening to WABC New York on a small clock radio in the late 70s from Northeastern MA (I could only get it at night)

I also remember seeing ch 8 from Mt Washington as well as 10 and 12 from Providence in 76-77.

Recently I was able to get the HD signal of CW28 one night (just one night,though)

 

[jimcutler]

This is a really fun thread.

Before WHDH went away I found a ton of unanswered letters from DXers in a file. And I found a big stack of WHDH QSL cards thanks to engineer Al Karp. So I answered them all. A lot of Scandinavian DXers. Many sent cassettes of HDH coming thru the QRM. The station gave me a lot of trouble about postage on these. So I paid the postage. (Man am I glad I don't work for the man anymore. No more arguing for weeks over pennies. I just buy what I need now. I'm going to digress here but once a salesperson brought me a script for a Bachman Turner Overdrive concert tour. I checked the library and there was no BTO CD's so I asked the salesperson to get some BTO music. He said he didn't want to spend the $14 for a CD and I should use "ANY music of any type I had" for the spot. LOL. ANY music of any type I had????? What, the Eagles? Dude, if it's a concert spot for BTO you gotta play BTO music. It's a concert spot to get people to come to see BTO. He wouldn't budge. I bought the CD myself, made the spot and went to petty cash to be reimbursed. Nope, station wouldn't pay me back. Ha. So getting them to pay for 113 envelopes going to Finland, etc., to send QSL cards "whatever they are, Jim!!!" was impossible. Those days are soooo long gone thank goodness. I've owned my own thing since 1995 and we're thriving.)

One late night in the early 1990's I made one hour boradcast DX test for AM DXers. We publicized it in advance and ran tones, morse code, Slow Scan TV of the WHDH logo, etc. We repeated the station ID very slowly in voice over and over and over picturing someone far away listening through the static crashes on their AM radio. That produced a bunch of reports from all over of people who copied the code and even the SSTV and each got QSL cards from me. I didn't have to fight hard to do put the the test on the air as excellent engineer Al Karp and Chief engineer Dana Poupolo were both hams and thought it was cool. Not a bad result for a signal so directional at night. We choose the time so it would still be dark in Western Europe and here in the States.

My best AM DX growing up on Long Island is KSL in Salt Lake, PJB on 800 from Bonaire, and Channel 3 from Tampa. Once I moved to Boston I pulled in two or three European AM stations over the years with the help of Lou Josephs from WROR. Lou and I were both correspondents for Radio Netherlands's Media Network program with Jonathan Marks and Lou really knows his stuff. When the expanded AM band first started up from 1610 to 1700 it was like shooting fish in a barrel. It must have been like DXing the Clear Channel signals in the 1930s and 40s. My best ham dx is a 2-way QSO on 6-meters using 5 watts with the Seychelles. For 60 seconds he was bombing in here in NY and I was there, too. What a catch with 5 watts into a random piece of wire...not even a proper antenna or beam.

Finally, there's the dream AM DX setup. Jonathan Marks (again from Radio Netherlands) was invited on a DX holiday to the very far north of Norway. Those guys have huts with miles of wire strung over the snow. The site is hundreds of miles from electric AC interference. He told me they tune big wonderful receivers to any broadcast band frequency, and as the earth's terminator rotates they'd hear another station waft in on that freq every few minutes from another place. They ate Reindeer (!) during the day and spent all night DXing the world on the AM broadcast band from the quietest place you can go.


Jim Cutler
major Radio geek
amateur callsign KS1A

 

[Chuckigo]

This is a really fun thread.

Before WHDH went away I found a ton of unanswered letters from DXers in a file.

(snip)... on a DX holiday to the very far north of Norway. Those guys have huts with miles of wire strung over the snow. The site is hundreds of miles from electric AC interference. He told me they tune big wonderful receivers to any broadcast band frequency, and as the earth's terminator rotates they'd hear another station waft in on that freq every few minutes from another place. They ate Reindeer (!) during the day and spent all night DXing the world on the AM broadcast band from the quietest place you can go.


Jim Cutler
major Radio geek
amateur callsign KS1A

Jim - i remember the nights when picking up WHDH in the studio would have almost warranted a QSL request...

and "eating reindeer...?" at this time of year? oh, the humanity!

my favorite night skips were paltry by comparisson to some of the reception reports listed here -
WKBW after dark outside of Route 128 made for fun evening AM Radio listening (when all one had was, er, mom's car with an AM only radio). and i had a decent bedroom stereo which would pull in some distant sigs at night including WOWO.

Chuck Igo

 

[jimcutler]

Chuck, WKBW BOOMED in like a local. I was just a little kid but I remember listening to them during the Blizzard of 78 as they got hit even harder than Boston.

 

[CTListener]

I also caught WESH on Channel 2 on several occasions in the '60s and early '70s, when I was in Massachusetts.

I lived in Arkansas from 1977 to 1980 and remember one day when the FM dial was jammed with signals from the upper Midwest. A couple of stations were doing Detroit Tigers and Milwaukee Brewers play-by-play. I called the request line of one of the stations I was hearing -- in Rice Lake, Wis. -- and spoke with a DJ who said he'd been getting calls from the South for the past half hour.

Much more common in Arkansas was tropo from the Gulf Coast. FM stations from Gulfport, Biloxi, Mobile and Pensacola would pound into Arkansas for hours at a time on summer afternoons and evenings.

I sure wish I'd written down the calls of these stations.

 

[Chuckigo]

Chuck, WKBW BOOMED in like a local. I was just a little kid but I remember listening to them during the Blizzard of 78 as they got hit even harder than Boston.

a little kid? dang - i got me that Christmas Spirit workin' (after 27 & a half days - and 7 more to go - of non-stop Christmas Music) so i'll have to be nice and let you get away with that one.

Merry Christmas to you, my friend (and my first Top 40/CHR pd!) !!!