Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor, Paul Walker, who shares the following reminder:
On Friday February 24th (today) starting at 2200 UTC and going until 0100 UTC on Saturday February 25th, the local afternoon program “Afternoon On The River” From KIYU 88.1 Galena, Alaska will be broadcast via the WRMI transmitter on 15770 kHz for the east coast of North America and western Europe. We’ll also be on 6855 kHz at the same time, beamed to the SW USA!
I’ve footed the bill for this personally and am doing this just for fun. No QSL’s being offered for this broadcast.
Just listen in and enjoy. A phone number is given out from time to time during the show for requests.
Many thanks, Paul!
DJ was “Flyin’ Brian” (Brian Landrum?, General Manager of KIYU) for this “oldies” music program. Program started out very nicely with a strong interference-free signal here in New Brunswick in the Canadian Maritimes (after the brief hick-up of dead air) on 15770 kHz. But it deteriorated gradually during the three-hour broadcast and ended up almost buried in the noise by the end. Really, 15770 kHz is too high a frequency for an evening broadcast to eastern North America at this time of year, let alone expecting it to propagate to Europe, which it did not based on monitoring using the U. Twente receiver. Perhaps the time-slot for the 15770 frequency was all that was available for a three-hour broadcast at this time.
Unfortunately, there is more bad news about this broadcast. I recorded the whole thing and only today got through listening to all of it. There were significant problems with the feed to WRMI for this live broadcast. During the first hour, several times the KIYU broadcast was replaced by WRMI’s “World Music” filler for five minutes or so. This also happened once or twice in the second and third hours, too. At no point did I hear any announcement saying that they were also on shortwave for this special broadcast. The signal started to deteriorate here in NB (directly in the direction of the beam of the 15770 kHz transmitter’s antenna) at about 00:10 UTC or 8:10 p.m. local time, well past sunset. The signal came back to listenable strength for a short while later but by the end of the program, the signal was buried again in the noise. I could barely identify the WRMI ID just before 01:00 UTC and (presumably) the following sign-off of the transmitter. Nevertheless, it was interesting to hear this live broadcast from central Alaska including the local weather reports and the problems that the weather had on the high school sporting events.
Yup…
Some internet glitches caused the dead air at the start and the World Music fill.
Oops. Such is tech in the bush!