Tag Archives: AM Radio

Pure AM Radio Nostalgia: Vintage Aircheck Recordings from the 1970s by Dan Greenall

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Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor Dan Greenall for once again sharing a remarkable collection of vintage off-air AM radio recordings. In this post, he shares recordings made from his home and during his travels across North America and the Caribbean.

Dan writes:

Hi Thomas

Judging by the interest on my Internet Archive page, vintage AM radio audio clips from the 1970’s are among the most popular files. In addition to the one posted on the SRAA in September 2023, here are the remaining ones I have to take you back 50 years.

VOA Marathon 1973

The Voice of America station from Marathon Key, Florida is heard signing off on its frequency of 1180 kHz. This recording was made while on vacation in West End, Bahamas in December 1973. Reception of the station in much of North America was tough due to the signal being south beamed to Cuba. However, at least one listener in New Zealand managed reception as evidenced by the attached QSL image from 1972.

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ZNS3 Bahamas 1973

ZNS3 radio on 1060 kHz from Freeport, Bahamas is heard with a station identification jingle. The recording was made while on vacation in West End (near Freeport) on Grand Bahama Island in December 1973.

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Bermuda AM/FM airchecks 1975

Brief airchecks from 5 local radio stations recorded while visiting Bermuda in March 1975. They are as follows:
ZBM1 1230 kHz
ZBM2 1340 kHz
ZBM-FM 89.1 MHz
ZFB1 960 kHz
ZFB-FM 94.9 MHz

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WVMT Burlington VT 1975

Brief aircheck from radio station WVMT in Burlington, Vermont on 620 kHz recorded in March 1975 in Montreal, Quebec. Starts with “Mandy” by Barry Manilow, station ID, then into NBC news.

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XERF Ciudad Acuna, Mexico 1971

Short audio recording of radio XERF on 1570 kHz as received in Ancaster, Ontario, Canada in November 1971.
“This is radio station XERF in Ciudad Acuna, Coahuila, Mexico. This is Paul Kallinger, your good neighbor along the way.”
Used a Hallicrafters S-52 communications receiver and a longwire antenna.

Audio Player

KPCR Bowling Green, MO 1973

KPCR radio in Bowling Green, Missouri as heard in Ancaster, Ontario, Canada on 1530 kHz during an overnight DX test on December 17, 1973. They only ran 1000 watts, but 50 kw WCKY in Cincinnati was off the air that night. Used a Realistic DX150A receiver and a longwire antenna.

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KFDI Wichita, KS 1974

A brief aircheck from KFDI Radio 1070 in Wichita, Kansas as heard in Ancaster, Ontario, Canada on February 22, 1974. Receiving equipment was a Realistic DX150A using a longwire antenna.

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WDXR Paducah, KY 1974

WDXR radio in Paducah, Kentucky is heard signing off for their broadcast day. This recording was made circa 1974 while they were operating on 1560 kHz. Receiver location was Ancaster, Ontario, Canada and equipment was a Realistic DX150A and longwire antenna.

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WANN Annapolis, MD 1974

A brief aircheck of WANN radio in Annapolis, Maryland heard here signing off for their broadcast day. The recording was made circa 1974 while they were operating on 1190 Khz, A lucky catch for me since WOWO in Fort Wayne, Indiana was usually heard on 1190. Receiver location was Ancaster, Ontario, Canada, (40 miles SW of Toronto) and equipment used was a Realistic DX150A and a longwire antenna.

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WCPC Houston, MS circa 1974

One of the easiest ways to log the state of Mississippi on the AM broadcast band in the 1970’s from my location near Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, was WCPC in Houston, MS on 940 kHz around local sunset. Here they are giving a station ID as heard on a Realistic DX-150A receiver and a long wire antenna.

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XEMO Tiajuana, Mexico circa 1971

Here is a brief English language aircheck from radio station XEMO in Tiajuana, Mexico as received in Ancaster, Ontario, Canada (a distance of 3392 km or 2108 miles) circa 1971. They were broadcasting on their frequency of 860 kHz. At the very end, there is a quick “X E M O Tiajuana Mexico” in Spanish.

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WGR Buffalo, NY 1973

Here is a brief aircheck/jingle from radio station WGR in Buffalo, New York on 550 kHz as recorded in 1973 at Ancaster, Ontario, Canada. That same year, the song “Get Down” by Gilbert O’Sullivan reached number 7 on the Billboard Top 100, and WGR aired it regularly as heard here in the second recording, Most of the time they would just ID as “GR-55”.

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Vintage AM radio airchecks 1975 recorded from Bermuda

These brief vintage AM broadcast band airchecks were recorded in March 1975 while vacationing in Warwick, Bermuda at the Belmont Hotel.
1. ZDK, Antigua, West Indies 1100 kHz
2. WKAQ, San Juan, Puerto Rico 580 kHz
3. Radio Paradise, Basse Terre, St. Kitts, West Indies 1265 kHz
4. WHN, New York, NY 1050 kHz
5. WKBR, Manchester, NH 1250 kHz
6. WRKO, Boston, MA 680 kHz
7. CFBC, St. John, NB, Canada 930 kHz

Audio Player

KKJO St. Joseph, MO 1973

In the wee hours of October 28, 1973, this DX recording was made of radio station KKJO in St. Joseph, MO broadcasting on 1550 kHz in the AM broadcast band. My receiving post was some 800 + miles distant in Ancaster, Ontario, Canada. I was using a Realistic DX150A communications receiver hooked up to a long wire antenna. You can hear the station fade gradually in and out a number of times during the recording, but fortunately faded in around the 2:49 mark to catch their station ID and announcement about returning to Central Standard Time. Paul Simon’s “Kodachrome” is heard at first, and Art Garfunkel’s “All I Know” afterward, 2 very popular songs in 1973.

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KRLD Dallas, TX 1974

KRLD in Dallas, Texas on 1080 kHz was not heard often at my listening post in Ancaster, Ontario, Canada during the 1970’s. WTIC in Hartford, CT was normally received on this frequency instead. Here is a recording made in early 1974 when KRLD managed to make it through. My receiver was a Realistic DX150A hooked up to a longwire antenna.

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Vintage AM radio airchecks 1973 part 2

Here are a few more airchecks from the AM broadcast band recorded in 1973 at Ancaster, Ontario, Canada unless otherwise noted below.

1. WLW Cincinnati, OH 700 kHz
2. WIRK West Palm Beach, FL 1290 (recorded in West End, Bahamas)
3. WINZ Miami, FL 940 (recorded in West End, Bahamas)
4. WSMB New Orleans, LA 1350 (recorded in West End, Bahamas)
5. WDBO Orlando, FL 580 (recorded in West End, Bahamas)
6. WPOM Riviera Beach, FL 1600 (recorded in West End, Bahamas)
7. KFYR, Bismarck, ND 550
8. KWAM Memphis, TN 990
9. WPTR Albany, NY 1540
10. WOKY Milwaukee, WI 920
11. WIBC, Indianapolis, IN 1070
12. WPDX Clarksburg, WVA 750 (special DX test early hours of Feb. 18, 1974)
13. WMAQ Chicago, IL 670
14. WBT Charlotte, NC 1110
15. WNOE New Orleans, LA 1060
16. WSM Nashville, TN 650
17. WJR Detroit, MI 760

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73

Dan Greenall, Ontario, Canada

Click here to view all of Dan Greenall’s Archive.org contributions and click here to browse his collections on the Shortwave Radio Audio Archive.

Eye On America: NC radio station becomes voice of recovery after Hurricane Helene

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From CBS Evening News:

After Hurricane Helene devastated western North Carolina, a couple of radio broadcasters played a critical role in keeping residents informed. Now, six months later, they have taken on a new role in the recovery. Skyler Henry reports.

Click here to view on YouTube.

Having experienced the devastation of Hurricane Helene firsthand, I can confirm that this radio station, along with its FM relay, delivered crucial community updates when both internet and mobile phone services failed.?Never underestimate the power of local radio. — Thomas

Bob’s Radio Corner: Pairing a Phone or Tablet with a Radio

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Pairing a Phone or Tablet with a Radio

By Bob Colegrove

The Internet is full of resources for radio listeners and hobbyists.  There are numerous examples of general information, frequency, and schedule lists.  There are also WebSDR sites, which allow you to compare reception experiences from around the world.  All of these can be accessed quickly and easily by having them loaded on your phone or tablet operating side-by-side with your radio and having Wi-Fi or cellular access.  We never had any of this when I was starting out.

I realize there are other ways to go about what I have described below, for example, merging station listings with SDR.  This posting is for folks like me who are SDR-challenged.  I listen to plain old radios.  My modern-day experience with newfangled technology has been limited to hitchhiking on WebSDR sites for the last few years.  It has served me well.

Ideally, I would like to generalize this topic to simply cover all phones and tablets.  In truth, my experience has been limited to an iPhone and Kindle Fire tablets.  They have worked very well as I shall explain.  Perhaps you have paired a different phone or tablet with your radio, in which case, feel free to share your experience.

The choice of a phone or tablet is yours.  Either works well.  Your decision will be affected by what you have available and what is easier to use.  If you intend to buy a new device and associate it with your radio, cost will be an additional factor.

A noteworthy device (the one I tend to favor) is a Kindle Fire.  Mainly, they are cheap.  The regular price of a 7-inch model is just under $60 and can often be purchased for less during Black Friday and Prime Day sales.  It is versatile, possessing all the usual functions except for cellular access.  Perhaps most importantly, it is virtually noise-free.  For a while I struggled using Internet sources on a laptop computer.  Even a good one located about 10 feet away from the radio antenna generates noise.  On the other hand, I have taken a 7-inch Kindle Fire in hand and placed it against the resonant coil of a loop antenna.  This abuse generated no more disturbance to the antenna than if it were a block of pinewood.  I have noticed some slight noise from the 11” Kindle when the antenna is exposed this way, but when that tablet is held at arm’s length from the antenna, all is well.  Recently, I have expanded this application to my iPhone and found its noise immunity matches that of the Kindle Fire 7.

Broadcast Schedules

The most useful Internet resources are the broadcast schedules.  These are the comprehensive frequency-time-station listings that tell us where and when to tune.  There are many good ones.  My favorites are the EiBi listing http://www.eibispace.de/, and Dan Ferguson’s https://groups.io/g/swskeds/topics.  For the latter you will need to request membership.  SWskeds merges EiBi, Aoki (https://www1.s2.starcat.ne.jp/ndxc), HFCC (https://new.hfcc.org/index.php), as well as other sources into a single list.

Processing

The EiBi listing comes as a CSV-formatted text file, which can be imported into a spreadsheet. I have done some processing using spreadsheet functions to produce a customized listing.  Processing the frequency-time-station lists is most conveniently done using a computer rather than the phone or tablet.   Processing includes selecting, arranging, or filtering the downloaded data tailored to your needs.  This might include adding a filterable column to indicate only stations that are on at the current time.  Some users might favor filtering by country or station. The heavy lifting processing is done automatically whenever a new listing is published by simply dropping the new file into the existing spreadsheet.  No, the functionality of a spreadsheet and ease of editing are not as good on a tablet as with the mouse and keyboard of a computer.  My processing on the computer includes measures to optimized the screen view to the most essential information thus minimizing the amount of scrolling on the tablet.

After the files are downloaded and processed, they can be loaded on the phone or tablet in a couple of different ways.  They can be directly transferred over a USB cable, or they can be transferred using a cloud server.  The USB cable-transfer method may be difficult on some devices, particularly iPhones.  The Kindle seems to be the more convenient device.  Being an obedient Microsoft customer, I can also transfer the files from my computer to OneDrive, then pick them up on the Kindle or iPhone using the OneDrive and Microsoft 365 apps which are available for both phone and tablet.

Examples

The screenshot below shows an EiBi example at 0014 UTC.  Although the “ON” column filter is set to show only transmissions currently “ON,” it had not been manually updated on the Kindle for a couple hours and thus includes listings from a previous time.  The EiBi database does not include transmitter power or beam information.  However, the identification of countries and transmitter sites is extensive.  These are determined by downloading and printing the README.TXT file on the EiBi site.

The SWSkeds listing is available in both CSV and Excel formats.  It contains several additional data fields, very importantly including transmitter power and beam direction when available.  For this list, I make the simple conversion of the existing Excel data range tab, “COMBINED” to a table so I can easily apply filters.  The screenshot below shows an example at 1750 UTC with the “ON” column filtered to “ON.”

Not to be left out, the complete medium wave broadcast station list for Region 2, the Americas, is easily downloadable at https://www.fcc.gov/media/radio/am-query.  The entire database is formidable and contains nearly 600 pages in a printable format.  Much of this bulk is due to the doubled size necessitated by giving both daytime and nighttime power separate entries for each station.  A number of marginally useful data columns can be eliminated in spreadsheet processing.  I have added formulas to calculate the azimuth heading and distance from my listening post (blanked out in the example below).

A variation of the downloadable file format is the direct-query site, SHORT.WAVE.INFO.  Here you can simply enter queries by station, language, frequency, or band, and produce listings which match your criteria.  Any listings which are currently on the air will be highlighted in red.

WebSDR

Finally, I would like to mention the WebSDR sites.  While not used explicitly for broadcast schedules, these sites are great for anyone wanting to compare how well they are receiving signals relative to what others are experiencing.  Granted, location and time of day are big factors that affect reception, but it is still useful to make these relative comparisons.

Home base is http://websdr.org/ which presents a catalog of many WebSDR sites by location.  At the bottom of the page is a world map which pinpoints the location of each site.  Most of these sites cater exclusively to hams; however, The University of Twente, Enschede, Netherlands (http://websdr.ewi.utwente.nl:8901/) covers 0.000 to 29.160 MHz unabridged.  The screenshot below shows the tablet/phone version of the U. of Twente site.  There are also two sites on the US East Coast which cover some non-hamband portions of the SW spectrum:  http://na5b.com:8901/ in the Washington, DC area and http://websdr.k3fef.com:8901/ in Milford, Pennsylvania.  The SHORT.WAVE.INFO and WebSDR sites can be directly accessed and queried over the tablet’s browser and a Wi-Fi or cellular connection.

Using the System

In my relentless pursuit to log the Nibi-Nibi Islands, I will load up one of the frequency-time-station listings and start my DX session.  This typically includes a scan of a particular band, checking signals I can receive against the lists.  If my interest peaks on a particular catch (usually a weak one), I will switch the tablet over to a WebSDR site to see how it is being received in Europe or along the East Coast of NA.

In summary, ready access to these Internet resources using a phone or tablet next to the radio has notable advantages:

  • The frequency-time-station listings provide quick, reliable signal identification in most cases.
  • The WebSDR sites confirm that my antennas are doing their job.

Am I done?  I hesitate to stop here.  The process of discovery is a marvelous human experience.  The foregoing are merely starting points.  Other applications might include sunrise-sunset calendars or maps or propagation forecasts.  There are certainly other ways to do all this depending on your druthers.  I know I am erring by omission and neglecting many other good resources.  Let’s hear about yours.

AM Band RF Noise Study

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Photo by Brock Wegner on Unsplash

Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor, Dennis Dura, who shares the following article from Radio World:

NRSC Releases Details of AM Band RF Noise Study (Radio World)

Noise levels remained consistent throughout different environments, even in downtown Baltimore

The National Radio Systems Committee’s AM Improvement Working Group has published a study examining the effects of RF noise on AM radio reception in cars.

Radio World readers will find the study’s scientific detail of interest. Noteworthy was how RF noise on the road often did not vary amongst the diverse environments sampled. Overcoming downtown building signal degradation was more of a concern, according to the study’s authors. Additionally, the study found field strength projections of AM signals to often not be reflective of contour predictions.

The group’s study intended to provide a better understanding of how AM radio reception is affected by RF signal strength and noise in a range of roadway environments. The authors also provided some suggestions to overcome signal loss. [Continue reading…]

The ‘AM Radio for Every Vehicle Act’ is Back

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Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor, Dennis Dura, who shares the following news via Radio World:

Markey, Cruz Reintroduce AM Bill in the Senate (Radio World)

The legislation would require AM radio reception in new cars

The AM Radio for Every Vehicle Act has been reintroduced on Capitol Hill.

The legislation passed the Senate Commerce Committee in 2023 and the House Energy and Commerce Committee in 2024, and many legislators have expressed support. Yet backers could not get it across the finish line at the end of the recent Congress in December.

Senators Ed Markey, a Democrat, and Ted Cruz, a Republican, now have reintroduced the bill, which has 40 Senate co-sponsors. [Continue reading…]

Responding to “The Colegrove Inspiration”

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By Jock Elliott, KB2GOM

It was Bob Colegrove’s post — this one — that inspired me and set me on this path.

Medium wave broadcast band DXing (MWBCB) has a certain fascination for me, but I am poor at it. Oh sure, I have read the advice: map the band at noon, then again at midnight, and you’ll have a better idea of what’s unusual as you are tuning around. But I have never gotten around to doing the mapping, so my DXing skills are lousy at best.

When Bob asked, “What’s your favorite corner of the dial?”, he also mentioned the challenge hunting below 600 kHz. The implication: whatever is in that section of the band, there are probably not a lot of stations, and they are hard to hear. So, I reasoned in my tiny little brain: “If I hear anything down there, it’s likely to be DX.”

So I tried it, firing up the Grundig Satellit 800 hooked to an MFJ 1886 loop during the daylight hours. With exception of WROW, 590, in nearby Albany, NY, blasting oldies with 5,000 watts, I found nothing . . .  and I do mean nothing: nada, diddly, bupkas, cipher, rien . . . dead band . . . deader than old Jacob Marley. I try it again in the early evening with three different radios with exactly the same results. Nuts.

But then I try again with the Satellit 800/1886 combo at a little after 0900Z and take Bob’s advice about using single sideband. Aha! Carriers 540, 550, and 560. Then at 570, a weird mixture: religious programming in American English over male and female voices in Spanish with time ticks and tones in the background. Is there a time station on this frequency or is it some sort of bleed-over?

On Tuesday evenings I run the Radio Monitoring Net on the 146.94 repeater. During the net, I mentioned the unusual signal I had heard on 570, and W2SRA, an expert DXer, responded with the opinion that this was likely a religious station on Long Island, NY, intermixed with a station known as The Clock from Cuba.

Here’s what Wikipedia has to say about it: Radio Reloj (Spanish for Radio Clock) is a government-owned Spanish-language radio station in Cuba . . . The station is noted for the sound of a ticking clock in the background, with its hosts announcing the time, every minute of broadcast.

I checked the distance from Troy, NY, to Santa Clara, Cuba where the 570 AM station is located; it’s 1449 miles. Wow! According to Wikipedia, the AM transmit power is 50,000 watts

Then I remember that William, KR8L, mentioned that he likes searching above 1620 (another less populated region of the band), so I give that a try. At 1690, I hear oldies, followed by ads for Southern Maryland. The station finally ID’s as WPTX, 1,000 watts nighttime power, in California, MD, a distance of 339 miles. Yes!!

Thanks, Bob and William, for turning me on to some more radio fun!