Anyone out there into A.M. Dxing ?
I’ve been looking at AM radios with some long distance reception abilities .We vacation off grid and sometimes enjoy searching the band at night for long distance stations. I’ve picked up and played with various radios recently … trying to enjoy it without making it another obsession.:…
Do you have a little dx radio bug ?
In him was life; and the life was the light of men.
i used to AM listen for dx when bored when younger. Eh… maybe when camping on my gun trips i still would do it for the nostalgia. It IS amazing what you can find with careful tuning thru the crowded portion of the AM band on a clear night…
PS - i always preferred a ANALOG DIAL for this function… digital sucks. You had to develop the “touch” to tune in the crowded stations area, and only analog offered that.
i used to rig up little plastic pulleys glued on the dial… making a 10:1 ratio or better… and i ONCE made a 10:1…10:1 setup, LMAO… you know, gear theory?
i turn this knob with a pulley 10 times… it turns the next pulley connected by the rubber band once… and if THAT one is connected to the nexct one the same way? every 100 turns of my “fine fine tuner” knob makes one revolution of the tuning dial, LMAO… made tunign easy.
go FIGURE i ended up a HAM radio guy later in life, eh? LMAO…
Knocking the dust off of life. It’s been ages since I DX’ed AM BC but I was once pretty rabid about it. Wish I hadn’t thrown my logs out long long ago. When AM played music I’d spin the dial after I got tired of the local station’s limited playlists. Later I’d do the same to hear a few talk shows I couldn’t get locally. And when Katrina hit NOLA I tuned to WWL and heard of the devastation long before it made the local or internet news. My car radio stays programmed to stations that give the best traffic reports. There’s an AM stereo (CQUAM format) station locally which is privately owned- WPCI- and it has no commercials or other interruptions. It plays a variety of the owner’s favorite music and nothing else. AM is only different these days, not dead.
I’m lucky enough to have two of what are considered some of the best AM portables ever made- the 70’s era GE 2880B AM/FM and the GE P780H, an early 60’s rig which was a no-holds-barred effort to make the best AM receiver they could. Both run off of 6 “D” cells and play for hundreds of hours on batteries. They find stations you can’t hear with anything less than high-end SW or Ham rigs even without using the external antenna connection. Hook that up and you’re in for lots of DXing! These are valued collectors items but sometimes they show up at yard and garage sales where the owner thinks they’re just another old value-less radio and can be bought for a song. Learn what they look like and keep your eyes open for them.
AM DXing makes me feel like Captain Kirk, looking for new and unknown life in distant places where nobody has gone before. At night when the band open up it is amazing what you can hear, and yes analog has the advantage over most digital rigs because you can tune slightly to one side of a frequency for better rejection of stronger stations. Most digital rigs lack that ability or it is too coarse of an adjustment to be of much use for this. And one of the best times to play DX’ing is during non-storm caused power outages when local interference dies away.
I spend too much time online these days and my radio hobby has taken me into Ham radio but maybe I’ll find time to spin the AM dial once again someday soon just to see what’s out there. Like flashlights it’s a unique form of simple good clean cheap fun which is becoming hard to find in the complex modern world.
Phil
I miss doing this late at night, I did all thru my childhood and teens with a portable GE radio. I always stayed on a station long enough to identify and log it. In central IL on a cool clear night, the skip is amazing. I have picked up stations south of the boarder and in northern central America in the past. I still get stations from Nebraska, Pennsyvania and Arizona with some ease. The new portable electronics and computer over population seems to have had a fairly strong negative affect on AM hunting.
For BC DX the key to success is antenna.
Mike
anyone have AM stereo?
When I first got my little cc crane2 radio I spent a little time playing on the am side. The thing really works good at picking up distant and skip. I was listening to East Indian music at one point it was coming in clear and the later lost it, don’t really know if it was a station in Canada or us or India
Used to be a Big Fan. Never was much else to do around home, before I was old enough to drive. I even built & repaired AM (etc.) radios for family and friends. My little brother was the DX master, though. Even when the skip wasn’t in, he could pick up stations from all over the East. I thought I was doing good to get WROQ in Charlotte for the Dr. Demento show. He taught me to just ignore the static, which turned out to be a wonderful ‘universal lesson in life’.
Not DX related, but I once solved a random, recurring hard-lockup of a robotic QA system with an AM radio. Think about that when you’re listening to your MP3 player! In this multi-million-$$ automated plant, one certain overhead crane needed brushes & when it was being moved near our robot at a certain moment during the Motion Profile, the RFI buzz would lock us up hard. My predecessor quit over not being able to solve this; and the plant was plenty disappointed with my boss, especially since no one else could touch any of the bespoke, mission-critical systems we serviced on-plant.
It couldn’t be reproduced, ever, by anybody (our testing never included incidentals like cranes) so I was allowed and even encouraged to just hang out nearby whenever I got the chance. Being easily bored, and since there was a Civil-Defense AM station in town with decent programming and the biggest stick in the entire State, I would hide a pocket AM radio on me & run the earpiece under my shirt to my ear…
Yes, I heard it on the radio.
I found & corrected the cabinet’s and the robot’s Earth connection (someone had tied it to a simple bolt in the floor, no ground rod!), advised Plant Maintenance to service that crane, and “Bob’s yer Uncle!” The plant Maintenance Manager borrowed my radio to discover which of the cranes was bad, so I also got to do what I like best, “share the wealth”.
That little $2 pocket radio (and a lifetime of experience) earned me the privilege of cloning the entire system & shipping my clone to a sister plant overseas where it works to this day. Woo-hoo!
I remember the AD CAMPAIGN of the GE radio the 2880-B…. it was on a TV commercial when i was a kid, with the actors playing around listening to the radio in hot air balloons… thejingle was…
“The farther out you Go…. The more you need SUPER-radio…….”
A friend I rarely see does- he’s a BC Engineer looking after different transmitters. That stuff was costly which makes it rare, there were 4 different non-compatible AM stereo formats proposed and 3 were actually used in the US. My friend says it beats FM Stereo for channel separation and clarity.
Phil
Being up in the great white north during the summer nights has just given me an excuse to go out and hunt down some interesting,older,cheap, radio upgrades Some of this madness started with a nice clean toshiba rt-200 boombox that replaced a trashy Emerson my wife bought as a kitchen radio . Thrift store finds may be far and few.between..but at times unbelievably good too . The up side of the local thrift store is most any radio is only $5 or less...What it lacks in choices it makes up for in price .:) So instead of rushing off to buy a $60 clean used "G.E Superadio" off Ebay ...A large number of 2$ am/fm radios have come home to be tested cleaned up ,evaluated and played with ...Some good ..some not so good.
A week ago I picked up a select-a-tenna for 3$
www.youtube.com/embed/HAXPfnuCwTg
When I was a kid I did it. Got a list of radio stations from the back of a magazine and tried to check them all off. First time I heard skip I was amazed. I even strung an antenna from our house across the back yard, across others peoples back yard and tied it to a tree across their street. That didn’t last long though, forced to take it down.
I even made a “radio shack” in my closet. I think my parents thought I was nuts.
> am radio and diagnosing noise
I wish we had better info on RFI from drivers. I had one flashlight that would set off one particular car alarm in the neighborhood if I happened to turn the flashlight on and change mode just as I walked past that car.
And I just read a comprehensive article on how to set up a solar power system on your roof without making life hell for the ham radio operator underneath it.
Turns out solar photovoltaic rooftops can be made quite quiet in RF but that as normally installed they’re big electronic noisemakers.
Electronic smog — plague of the century.
And just like ocean waves, there will be moments and places where they momentarily cancel out and places where, momentarily, they sum up to a RF spike and dump a surprising amount of energy into whatever’s there. Nobody believed in “rogue waves” on the ocean, for centuries — surprise, real monster
that just appears briefly ‘out of nowhere’ — and I can’t see any reason why RFI doesn’t do the same thing.
Boaz, I still have a couple of those GE Super Radios here, new-in-the-box ‘unfired’, if you need one. When I realized they were going to quit making them I grabbed a couple more. (I’m as radio nutty as I am flashlight nutty). I smell a potentially wicked swap session coming up here… 
> GE Super Radios
can I be next in line for one?
— N6VSB
Sure. PM me your address, and I’ll try to estimate postage. Unfortunately, we pay dearly for postage in Canada and that kills a lot of otherwise fun deals.
“RF smog”- quite apt terminology and a cheap transistor radio tuned between stations still makes a good tool to find it’s local source. As you can imagine, the only tall hill in my town is covered with transmitters (except for AM BC- go figure!) and one of the 2 VHF Ham repeaters up there occasionally does weird things because of that “smog”. Once it was being keyed by a harmonic signal from the police transmitter which had drifted slightly off frequency mixing with the fire transmitter- that was a tough diagnosis since they both had to be keyed together to cause the problem. Take a Geiger counter up there and it will click like mad. Those big LCD billboards are huge offenders for RFI as are electric cars. Maybe that explains the voices in my head! (JK)
I used to have a list of AM DX websites but lost them in a HD crash long ago and never went back to rebuild that list. SWL’ing was once fun too but the internet is replacing BC’ing as society’s primary voice communication media, and more’s the loss to those of us who experienced radio in it’s heyday of world dominance. Another fun DX is LW for aircraft beacons, the ID’s are slow CW and that’s all you’ll hear but it trains your ears to pick out the signal from the static very well.
Not so fun for me is a small factory maybe 500M from here which sometimes generates so much RFI on lower bands that only strong stations can be heard and when that place is quiet you get noise from the ancient electrical transformers throughout this old neighborhood that have been in service since the 1950’s. I’m in RF hades about as bad as on that hill I spoke of earlier. Only thing good here is FM and digital because of the RF smog. If I ever get moved out of the city though things will be a lot different. I’ve got a low doublet up tuned for 75M which makes a decent AM BC aerial when the power goes out and things quiet down- it took my next-door neighbors yard and mine both for that much wire. Gotta fix the PS in the old Swan one day so I can use it as intended.
Getting back on topic one great source for receiving aerial wire is the core of small transformer; enamelled for WX protection and thin enough to be nearly for those who aren’t supposed to have an outside antenna. Don’t string it tight though, the thin wire will break if strained like that. Scrape or sand the enamel where attaching to the radio.
Happy DX from KG4FQG
Phil
I was DXing before I knew I was DXing. In grade school (60’s) I used to sneak up in the attic and play with my Dads old Hallcracters S38 AM shortwave radio. He had a long wire antenna strung through the rafters. I remember hearing lots of foreign languages but most importantly I discovered Rock n Roll.
I still have that old radio. A couple years ago I tried to get it working again. It needed to be restrung, new tubes and I replaced all of the old wet capacitors with “Orange Drops”.
Something is still not right so there it sits 
okay yeah, like you said “i was DXing before i knew it was DXing…”
i am in my late 40s… as a kid? we would all have one of those tiny AM “transistor” radios, i think it ran off of a 9v battery? little thing fits in your hand. I discovered the humble EARPLUG, so, when i was sent to bed? i was amazed at how many stations i could carefully tune in in the crowded portion of the AM band late at night on clear nights, lol…
hey, when i was little? we didnt have cable, we didnt have internet, we didnt have computers tablets and smart phones… late at night when you were supposed to be pretending you were asleep? this was the only game in town…
Picked up a very lovely Panasonic 1401
think I paid $3.00
In his mega Am radio shoot out he gives it a fairly good score stock and a * 5 Star rating after fairly simple mods .
https://radiojayallen.com/am-portables-mega-shootout-2016-update/