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I had to read all the posts in this thread to make sure I hadn't posted this in the past and forgotten--ha! Back around 1997 or so just fooling around on the FM dial, I picked up a station from Panama City Beach, FL in our living room in northeastern South Dakota. Just a cheapo Magnavox compact bookshelf stereo with a wire antenna that was probably flung up over the curtain rod. Pretty sure it was 106.3 or 106.7 and I wrote the info down at the time but don't know if that survived of where it is now. Blew my mind at the time though.
The last good band opening where I live was last summer... I was getting stations from all over!!
I remember in the 80s when we had amazing conditions in the summer!!!!! -- Every morning about channels 2-5 would skip in and around 11 they all faded away.....
I'm in Las Vegas and can get an AM station in San Francisco some nights. I want to say KSFO maybe?
I remember picking up Q106 (a San Diego Top40 station) that simulcasted on the AM600 frequency back in the late 80's. I was in the Bay area and could only pick them up at night.
I was a radioman in the Navy.
Part of our job was to keep a voice channel with a shore station up 24 hours a day, as the ship I was on cruised independently, so there was seldom any near-by fleet support.
When reception was reliably good, we only had to make a radio check twice a day.
There were many times when we couldn't raise another Navy station at all. During those times, we were had to try to raise a reply once an hour and we kept a log on the attempts.
When we did reach a station, it would be logged too.
There was a big manual next to the transmitter that had all the call signs of the ships and shore stations in the Atlantic next to the transmitter.
Once in a while, a call sign that was new would respond, but that was pretty rare. It never took long to know which station was the closest to us, and we all got to know which calls signs we would get. A call sign, two words, is issued to every ship and shore station, and never changes.
On one cruise, my ship was in the southernmost Atlantic, approaching the Straits of Magellan, and the weather had been stormy. We hadn't made any voice communication at all for a week.
I was alone in the radio shack pulling a mid watch, from midnight until 6 a.m. When I sent out a call for a signal check, I got a response that was so clear it was a perfect 5 by 5- the best signal strength possible.
When the operator on the other end, a female sailor, gave her call sign, it was one I had never heard before, ever. And it was the same with her. She could hear me flipping pages in the book while I could hear her flipping pages.
She was sending from the naval shore station at Reykjavik, Iceland. We were literally at the opposite ends of the planet. Neither of us could believe it!
^^^ Radio skip during sunspot activities is and has been very common. Some of the higher frequencies are more affected than the lower ones in the typical AM broadcast bands. DXing is always interesting and a hobby in of itself.
Back in the late 70's/early 80's, on my little transistor radio, I use to pick up am stations as far away as Chicago, Pittsburg, and Boston while living in Virginia Beach. Each night was different and sometimes the stations would fade in and out.
I've gotten JOAK (NHK I) and JOKR (TBS Radio) at the WA coast a few times. JOAK's an easy catch around sunrise and tends to fight a little with what I think might be KSSK.
JOKR is doable if you can null out KJR's sidebands. The farther away from Seattle you are the better. I've heard it in Manzanita, OR with little effort other than keeping the radio pointed west.
With a little coaxing you can sometimes even get Pyongyang Broadcasting Station's MW simulcast ("Pyongyang Pangsong imnida") on 657 at the coast but it sometimes fights with KTNN and CFFR. Uh... maybe considering the present climate it'd be best not to mention North Korea and fighting in the same sentence. It's the easiest to identify. Where else do you hear wildly-arranged electonic light music, opera and military marches all in the same program?
Reading another radio-related forum I see China and eastern Asia are hot into WA right now. Apparently the ionosphere is really hot right now. One certain well-known young DXer in the Yakima area reports hearing many Japanese, North Korean and Chinese signals earlier this week, mostly around 1400GMT. (Searchy searchy: "Was I transported to an ocean beach? 3 new TP's !! 10/30/18".) So if you're on the Best Coast, you're actually up at that ungodly hour and can get far enough away from all the power supply/LED ballast hash now I guess is as good a time as any to DX the Far East. Good luck.
Last edited by Ttark; 11-03-2018 at 11:30 PM..
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