Welcome back – it’s been two months since one of our columns, so a little bit of catching up to do. Seems here that, apart from the thunderstorms, typical late summer (i.e. improving) conditions are beginning to show up – had some good sunset skip the last week of July and first week of August, which has been standard for me, anyway. You’ll note later some comments on poor conditions; those were from early in the summer.

Ben Dangerfield <BEN-DANGERFIELD@email.msn.com>: Have any studies been done as to groundwave limits [and that would include salt-water groundwave]? And at what point does skywave begin to mix in? In my experience, my best non salt-water ground wave reception was in Pittsburgh in the 1930's when WNAX-570 was sometimes heard at noon when both WOSU and WKBN were off. They once shared time. That was about 1000 miles. On salt water paths 1000 plus seems to be often possible on the east coast. But during the winter months there is always some skywave present, even at noon, so that such long distance reception can be enhanced, especially after 1300.

Russ Edmunds <wb2bjh@hotmail.com>: The generally-accepted theoretical limit for groundwave reception is in the vicinity of 1000-1250 miles, the broad range largely because of the problem of skywave mixing. That mixing can occur pretty much at any point beyond about 150 miles, depending on 1) conditions, and 2) power/relative strength of the groundwave signal. At night, from North Jersey, it was not at all uncommon to receive then-WQXR-1560 via a predominantly skywave nighttimes even at less than 50 miles from the XR. My best midwinter solid-groundwave signal (to the best of my ability to determine it, hi) were WHO-1040 and WCCO-830, both from North Jersey, each at just about 1000 miles. I did an article back in the early '70's, which is still in reprints, where I reported on a study done by a North Jersey consulting broadcast engineer on groundwave, which documented changes in the average distances of groundwave signals in winter vs. summer which showed some appreciable increases in groundwave distance in summer. Although he didn't conclude that the predominant reason was likely the absorption of skywave components owing to longer daylight, it nonetheless is. I don't recall any other studies having been done on this in any of the literature I used to have on propagation before I turned it over to NRC Monographs about 10-12 years ago.

Patrick Martin <mwdxer@webtv.net>: The best I have done on groundwave was in the early 70s, when I was using a 600 foot N/S antenna in Warrenton with my old RBO 2 EH Scott receiver. One Winter I logged KORL-HI/ KYAK-AK on 650 kHz. This was most of the day and then one day between 1100-1300 local time (PST) and I logged WCCO-830, WLS-890, and WOAI-1200. The good ol' days. I can't even do that with a beverage these days.

Neil Kazaross <neilkaz@interaccess.com>: Unless you received these stations commonly in the day. I think you had some slight skip enhancement. I honestly would expect you to hear some Alaskans during daylight from your Northern QTH around the solstice given a clearish channel. As for the southerly KORL. I suspect that unless it was basically almost always audible...that you had some weak daylight skip enhancing it. Ditto for WCCO/WLS/WOAI. All kinds of weak skip was audible daytimes from Ogunquit ME in the winters of 81 and 82 on some days. I'm talking about WAMB in TN on 1160 and 660 from SC behind WNBC and several similar logs at noon, none of which were enhanced by any water path. In the late 70's from Narragansett RI I could get a weak daytime carrier on 1200 detectable almost anytime when WOAI was the only station on 1200 (This looped to TX and not Venezuela)and some similar stuff like a 1040 WHO carrier. I think some very weak daytime skip is very common and may reach audible levels given a superb and quite QTH...which is harder and harder to have as time passes.

Kevin Redding <lwdxer@juno.com>: Kaz, I can second that. Living 28 miles west of Narragansett in Westerly, RI, I got much of the same in the early 1980s. About 1983 though things were too crowded and that was the end of the great daytime stuff. At night though, it was second best of all places to DX from on land. The best land site was in Hawaii. The best I ever enjoyed was on the USS Caron, DD-970.

Patrick Martin: There might have been skip involved there. As I remember there signals were weak but stable. I wish I would have had a beverage in those days! Back in the days when 1400 kHz was clear. The nearest station on MMs was WMAN-Ohio.

The previous meesages led to the following antenna discussion:

Ron Gitschier <RGITSCHIER@doyle.navy.mil>: Not having been indoctrinated in the art of hardcore DXing, please excuse my ignorance. When stringing these very long lengths of wire out are you looking to capture signals from directions parallel or perpendicular to the direction the wire is pointing? (Assuming it's in a straight line.)

Russ Edmunds: Stations should come in along the direction of the wire. If your wire runs N/S, that's where your signals should come from. And thanks for another good question for my DXN column, hi!

Kevin Redding: Ron, This is probably not what you want to hear, but the answer is, it depends. Here’s why I say that. If you are using a wire longer than 1000' and it isn't a beverage, you will get signals off the sides of the wire and the direction is 90 degrees from the direction the wire is pointed. If you terminate the wire with a resistor into a ground, then the wire is directional towards the end of the wire and not the sides. So I guess that’s about it in a nutshell. On occasion I go out in the desert and run wires. Sometimes I go with Skip Dabelstein, and sometimes I go out a little further away from civilization alone and run them. I only know one thing, the longer the better when it goes to wire antennas.

Kevin Redding: "Stations should come in along the direction of the wire." My experience is VERY different from this. If the wire is not terminated, then the signals come off the sides of the wire and if it is terminated, then the signal comes off the direction that the end of the wire is pointed. I often go in the desert and run wires and at least here, that has seemed to be the case when I do run wires. The longer the wire tends to make it a little directional if not terminated, but termination with real long wires will make it very directional. This sounds like a good thing for Skip Dabelstein to talk about. He knows more about long wires than I do. He's run some real long stuff.

Russ Edmunds: Since Ron was referencing "very long wires" so was my answer, especially since the question was initiated by reports using beverage or near-beverage antennas. But I'll defer to those who have actual firsthand experience with all different kinds - Bruce and/or Mark and/or Skip...

Ron Gitschier: Thanks, Russ for answering my question. If you need more questions, let me know... lol... I'm at your service. I haven't advanced to the hard-core enthusiast level yet, and that's only because I don't have the toys... yet. My wife knows that once we buy our first house after I retire from the Navy, the grounds _will_ be equipped with some sort of tower, etc... so she's forewarned. Back to the subject matter... Well, now it's no wonder my 'easterly-westerly' 100 foot wire thrown through the treetops disappointed me in Florida in the n/s-erly directions! I incorrectly surmised that it worked best on the 'flanks' or broadside. Ok, lets take this a step further. Since most every station on AM is vertically polarized (I’m not sure if I should use that term for the standard broadcast band), would we be better off with a vertical antenna vice horizontal, length for length... although it's not practical. I notice sometimes that if you hold a radio, say at waist or chest height and compare the signal (still on AM here) to when you hold it over your head, you get more signal on the strength meter. This was the case when I was informally measuring my former station's (then - WYHI, now WGSR-1570) signal intensity with my Panasonic RF-1170 (1150?) through different parts of our service area... when I had the time. Is this phenomenon typical? I was careful to watch for accidentally nulling the station.... Just full of questions....

Russ Edmunds: I can't answer your question about signal strength vs. height other than to note that because of the nature of wave propagation at BCB frequencies, elevation for a DX reception site is a definite advantage. Whether the kinds of differences you note are either normal or significant, I have no idea. And as to your question about MW signals, I'm not 100% certain, but I don't believe that the concept of vertical vs. horizontal polarization applies to AM at all. So, in both cases, I'll really have to defer to some of the more engineering-oriented types on board here...

Doug Smith <w9wi@bellsouth.net>: "If your wire runs N/S, that's where your signals should come from." I would suggest that should apply only when the wire qualifies as a "Beverage". Ron was talking about a 100-foot antenna, which is way too short to qualify. With computers, I suppose it *is* now practical to predict the directional characteristics of a 100-foot LW in the broadcast band, but I'm not going to try<g>. Seriously, I believe those characteristics will depend on the type of terrain the antenna is constructed over and the frequency within the band on which it's operated.

Patrick Martin: In experimenting with various lengths of antennas here on the Northern Oregon coast (2500 to 300 feet), I have found that a 300-500 foot wire places 3 or 4 feet off the ground over swampy land, the directivity of the antenna is amazing. Right now I am using 400 feet going at about 355-000 degrees, pretty much North. The antenna is very directional, much more than I thought. For instance at night when I switch to the antenna on 760 kHz, I lose KFMB-San Diego (South) and get CFLD-Burns Lake BC to the North. I find the 400 foot antenna in many ways works better than the 900 and 2500 foot ones I used to have. The longer beverages had more side lobes to contend with. The 400 foot antenna is a little more broad at the end which should be better for TA's this Winter, if they show up too. In any effect, and good ground system really helps too. I used to use the 4 foot copper-clad rods from Radio Shack, but I found after a year or so, the copper wire off leaving a very rusted iron pole in the ground. Now I buy 10 foot copper pipes, and cut those in 2's or 3's and pound those in the ground with lots of bare #12 or #14 copper wire. It works very good and costs less too. With the wet soil here, you can about push the pipes into the ground with your hands. Much of the year the grounding is underwater anyway, which works well here.

Mauno Ritola <ritola@pp.inet.fi>: I don't think such a short wire has any significant directional properties on medium waves.

Kevin Redding: Mauno, I could not agree with this more. When I have a wire about 500' that is unterminated, I tend to get more signal off the sides. When I have a longer wire terminated, I get the signal from the terminated end and when I have a short wire like I do at home about 200' long, it is pretty much omnidirectional. Others may have different results, but for the most part, that is what I have found to be true.

Russ Edmunds: A key issue here is termination. I deduce from Patrick's commentary that his 400' wire is terminated at the south. Another is ground conductivity. In the desert, it's essentially nil, whereas Patrick seems to have is located in a PNW coastal swamp, which has lots. Given how much this affects the behavior of beverages, there's no reason to think it wouldn't have significant effects, even if they're different ones, on his 400' wire...

Patrick Martin: My Northern Beverage is terminated at the North end, as it always has been. It is quite directional from about 340 to 40 degrees. I was forced to shorten the beverage after my neighbors put in a road cutting the length in half! But I found I like this 400 foot one better. Running a tight lobe to the North here isn't all that good. After hearing Whitehorse and other Northern Canadians, there isn't really much else you can hear. Over the pole, it didn't do a whole lot either. My EWE antenna worked better on Indian, Bangladesh, and Nepal on MW.

Patrick Martin: I do know that the "wet properties" of the NW Coast does things to antenna patterns. The wet termination on fairly short wires do very good. I have played with termination in Rancho Mirage, CA a bit but there isn't much of a change as there is very little water there. The Oregon coast gets 70-100 inches a year compared to 1-3 inches in Rancho Mirage.

Bruce Conti <BACONTI@aol.com>: The wetland probably plays a more significant role in determining the directionality of Patrick's 400-foot wire than the length. In my daily commute to work in Bedford MA, I used to note the effects of wetlands while stuck in traffic scanning the AM band on my car radio. (Route 3 is notorious for daily bumper-to-bumper drive time traffic between Burlington MA and Nashua NH.) Driving along Route 3, I would often note strong hets from transatlantic signals while passing through the Shawsheen River wetlands. The wetlands expose a large area to the east from Route 3, enhancing transatlantic signals along with domestics from Maine and Nova Scotia. Drive a few miles further down the highway, away from the wetlands, and the signals would disappear. The WRKO-680 transmitter site is situated in the same wetlands, undoubtedly giving the signal a boost to down-east Maine and beyond. Also, I believe a 400-ft wire according to the definition does not qualify as a Beverage at mediumwave frequencies. Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't a Beverage supposed to be at least as long as one wavelength?

Patrick Martin: Isn't 400 feet close to a wave length at the top of the MW band?

Doug Smith: According to my calculations, one wavelength at 1700KHz is about 579 feet. (at 530 kHz, it's 1857 ft.)

...all of which led to the following regarding summer DX conditions, which will get back to antennae:

Patrick Martin: In my 38 years of DXing I have never seen MW conditions so bad. I have seen some of the East Coast DXers report lots of TA DX this Summer, so it must not be that bad there. I can tell you living a mile from the Pacific Ocean where Hawaiians used to be local-like at night, they are extremely poor in the past several years and lately have been worse. If it wasn't for the EWE and beverages I wouldn't hear 90% of what I do hear. I think since we arrived back from CA on April 12th, I have had 2 or 3 nights (total) of any decent MW reception with the logging of FL & IL on 1570. Since I have always been an experimenter with antennas getting the lobes and nulls the way I want, I have checked and rechecked my antennas of late. They are working very well, but if the DX isn't coming in, using the best antenna in the world will not help. I guess we will have to wait until all this high sunspot activity goes away. At least a lot of FM & TV DXers are having fun this Summer. I remember the sunspot high in the late 70s & early 80s when 2 kW Aussies were heard about every morning. I am lucky now to hear Tahiti-738 & Tonga-1017 now.

Russ Edmunds: Remember, Patrick - the guys who are reporting most of the TA's are using phased longwires, beverage antennas and phased beverages at seashore site in Northern New England. Most of the rest of us would agree more with you!! And I need a static-suppressor!!!

Patrick Martin: Russ, you are right there, but I would think the TP stuff would come in here, but apparently conditions on the East Coast are far different than the West Coast. Oh course we are also talking about many kW TA's compared to at the most 50 kW TP's, too and twice the distance.

Ben Dangerfield: Patrick, if it is any consolation, the DX has been very poor here in Wallingford, even though I'm on the East Coast. The TA’s being reported are mainly from temporary sites along the New England coast. Nothing like that around here, and I'm near the Delaware River and about 50 to 60 miles from the ocean. Actually, these are the kind of conditions I have been encountering this time of year for decades.

Patrick Martin: Ben and others: Thanks for your comments on conditions. Yes, I agree that Summertime conditions aren't always the best. But conditions here in the NW are even worse than I have ever heard them. Even with phased wires and beverages, the reception is very poor most nights here. Hopefully they will improve by Fall.

Russ Edmunds: I think that perhaps the one additional factor besides the beverages and phasers which separates what is heard on the New England seacoast is that from the Philadelphia area, for many TA's our great circle path goes up across NJ, sometimes NYC and sometimes CT which translates into some 200-400 miles of land between us and when the path hits the open water. I noticed that big time adding some 100+ extra miles of it in moving here from North Jersey, although my lower elevation here and more hills in between also contributes...

Patrick Martin: I guess the antenna is more half to 3/4 wave, but being so close to the ground and over wet soil, also terminated it still has good North/NE directional properties. In my case the 1-2 Wave length beverage to the North was not all that great. It was too directional. It is funny, but when I shortened the wire to 900 feet at first, a couple years ago, there were TA’s coming in and I logged Germany-972 at 4:15 PM (PDT) along with Sweden-1179 shortly later. I never logged those in the past. The long beverage was too directional at 1800-2500 feet at about 350-355 degrees.

Next we take a look at a couple of bits of information that members have provided on the internet:

Barry McLarnon VE3JF <bm@lynx.ve3jf.ampr.org>: AM DXing is what sparked my interest in radio back when I was about ten years old. I soon got into ham radio and other pursuits and left AM behind, but I never lost that feeling of magic that came with pulling in a distant AM station. A few years ago, I returned to my radio roots and started AM DXing again. As we're often reminded these days, AM broadcasting ain't what it used to be! The march of technology hasn't been kind to AM, but there is one exception as far as DXers are concerned: the availability of PCs and the Internet make the hobby a lot more interesting. One example is mailing lists like this one. Another is all the web sites out there with useful information about the stations. If it weren't for the net, I doubt if I would have ever returned to the hobby... and I willingly put up with birdies from my PC in order to have those resources available when I'm listening to the radio. Despite all of the good stuff available on the net, there is always room for improvement. For example, I often found myself wanting to calculate the distance and bearing to a particular station, so I would look up the coordinates in the FCC database, and then go to a website where I could type in that lat/long along with my own, and it would give me back the info I was seeking. Doing another station means repeating the whole procedure again, which soon becomes rather tedious, so I wrote a little program to do the calculations on my own PC. My lat/long was hard-coded so I wouldn't have to enter it, and it was a fairly simple matter to have it take a callsign as input and go and look up the station's lat/long in a database such as Werner Funkenhauser's WHAMLOG. The next step was to grab and display additional info on that station from Lee Freshwater's BCB Logbook or William Demmery's Canadian AM Radio Directory. This was pretty cool! Then I got to thinking about some aids for ID'ing all those UNID stations. I started developing a program that would take a tentative callsign as an input, and return a listing of all of the stations on a given frequency that have similar-sounding callsigns. Then I came up with another utility that would display all of the stations on that frequency that have a particular programming format (whether this information is accurate or not is another question!). I can't keep all of this good stuff to myself, right? :-) I've just finished wrapping all of it up with a web-based interface, and "Version 0.99beta" is now available for you to try out at http://hydra.carleton.ca/ambc/aminfo.html. Before you try it, please read the info page at http://hydra.carleton.ca/ambc/amhelp.html. You need to use a reasonably recent-vintage browser that supports frames and javascript. I use Netscape and Linux, so I don't know how well the page will work with other browsers and/or other OS's. That's for you beta testers to tell me. :-) All comments welcome...

Mark Connelly <MarkWA1ION@excite.com>: I've put together a Web page with text of some recent e-mail discussions of phased antenna arrays. Much of the discussion revolves around medium wave (500-2000 kHz) but may be applicable to longwave and tropical band shortwave as well. Links to other information sources are included. The URL for this page is: "http://members.aol.com/MarkWA1ION/phased_arrays.htm"

By the way, the July 2000 issue of QST magazine has a very good article on Flag, Pennant, and Ewe antennas used on the 160-meter band.

And one additional item that was e-mailed directly to me:

Randy Smith <r.smith@erols.com>: Hi Dave, I picked up several of the DX News newsletters (winter-spring 2000) at a local hamfest. Reading your DX'er's Notebook was interesting. One thing that caught my attention is that no one ever mentions the K9AY terminated loop. I would think that this would be the most popular antenna in use. It's a fairly easy antenna to homebrew (Radio Shack has everything you need), has a 30x30' footprint, and some people say that it works *better* than a beverage. It's possible to use as a portable with a little work. Also if you were interested in just one DX station, it would be very simple to set up a one loop fixed antenna using just a balun, a variable resistor, and a ground rod. My listening station consists of a WJ-8711, a Lowe HF-100, a Stridsberg multicoupler, and a K9AY antenna mounted 50 feet from the house. My previous setup was two slopers mounted 50 feet from the house and fed by coax to an MFJ-1026mw phasing box. Links to the K9AY antenna are at;http://www.egroups.com/group/K9AYloop (see links for more)

http://www.hard-core-dx.com/nordicdx/antenna/loop/

http://www.arrl.org/tis/info/recwire.html

http://www.nordicdx.com/antenna/loop/qst9_97.html

A commercial version can be bought at

http://www.wellbrook.uk.com/products.html#K9AY

We’ll begin this section with a bit from Blaine Thompson’s <phredd@well.com> Indiana RadioWatch, dated July 01, 2000: IRW has learned that the D.C. Circuit Court of appeals has dismissed Rice's legal challenges to the FCC to regain his licenses. In Indiana, they own WBOW (640 AM, Terre Haute), along with WZZQ-AM & FM (1230am, 107.5fm, both Terre Haute). If interested, you can read the Court's decision at:http://pacer.cadc.uscourts.gov/common/opinions/200006/99-1198a.txtTalk/. WBOW's (640 AM, Terre Haute) tower was severely damaged during recent storms. Consequently, it has been dismantled and they're on the air using a backup antenna.

And the rest from Scott D. Fybush’s <fybush@world.std.com> NorthEast Radio Watch:

June 02, 2000: Unlike just about every other commercial broadcaster in the country, WJIB (740 Cambridge) owner Bob Bittner is (gasp!) a fan of the low-power FM movement -- and this week he put his license where his mouth is. Starting tomorrow, Bittner is donating his Saturday night airtime (starting at 9PM) to Allston-Brighton Free Radio, Steve Provizer's micropower community station that's currently having a hard time being heard on 1580 kHz with its hundred milliwatts of legal power. WJIB will carry ABFR's hyper-local informational programming, shows like "Boston's Seniors Count" and "Children's Health Connection, "bringing them to a far wider audience (even on 740's little 5-watt night signal!) than the 1580 transmitter can provide. There's still more good news to be found in the Bay State: Larry Glick is returning to radio on a regular basis. After paving the way for a comeback with guest appearances on WBZ's Steve Leveille show and on WMEX (1060 Natick), Glick has signed on with WMEX for a regular Sunday afternoon slot. It's only an hour -- 4 to 5 PM -- but that's an hour more of Glick than Boston listeners have enjoyed for nearly a decade! (Those of us outside WMEX range can listen to the Web feed on www.wmex.com). WPNT (1600 East Longmeadow) drops its simulcast of WAQY-FM (102.1) until Labor Day to become a nonstop ad for the Six Flags amusement park. Up in CANADA, some big changes this week for radio listeners in Fredericton, New Brunswick: The country programming of CKHJ has moved from 105.3 FM to the three-way simulcast (1260 Fredericton, 95.5 New Maryland, 103.5 Oromocto) that was, until last week, hit radio CIHI (aka "C-hi").

June 09, 2000: WESO (970 Southbridge) flipped from oldies to (mostly satellite) country late last year. Our loyal readers in NEW HAMPSHIRE tell us WBNC (1050 Conway) has been off the air since last Friday (June 2). Buffalo's WWKB (1520) has a new format, again. Since January, it's been relaying CHR WKSE (98.5 Niagara Falls); as of this week, it's business talk (none of it local), in addition to the leased talk on weekends, Bison’s baseball, and overnight trucking programs. Lockport's WLVL (1340) does a lot of local programming for a little graveyarder -- all morning, in fact, with local talk, "Tradio," and then into satellite land after noon. Niagara Falls' WHLD (1270) does some standards in the morning and old-time radio late mornings before the leased-time ethnic kicks in. Out in New Brunswick, they're shuffling licenses at co-owned CJCJ (920Woodstock) and CIKX (93.5 Grand Falls). The stations share their programming, but CIKX runs its own ads. Now CJCJ is giving up one of its two low-power AM relays, and turning the other into a relay of CIKX. Gone, soon, will be CJCJ-1 (1140) in Perth-Andover; CJCJ tells the CRTC it isn't needed since it serves the same area where CIKX has been operating for the last two years. CJCJ's other 40-watt relay,CJCJ-2 (990) in Plaster Rock, will presumably become CIXK-1 as it relays *that* set of ads instead of Woodstock's. (NERW wonders why CJCJ and CJCJ-2 haven't moved to FM yet?)

June 22, 2000: We begin this week in CANADA, where precisely a year after CBL Toronto said its final "adieu" on 740 and moved to FM for good, the CRTC is announcing its successor on the 50 kilowatt blowtorch frequency. The nod goes to Michael Caine's CHWO (1250 Oakville), which will move its adult-standards format down the dial to 740 by next June under the moniker "Prime Time Radio." Caine persuaded the CRTC that listeners over the age of 55 are under served on the Toronto dial, and says his station will serve as an "oasis" in the midst of the rock that dominates Toronto FM. It turns out 1250 won't go silent as a result of the move; the CRTC says Caine can lease that facility out to the Christian broadcasters who now lease 50 hours a week on CHWO sister station CJMR (1320 Mississauga). When they take over as "Joy 1250," CJMR will become all-ethnic (largely Asian languages. We see that WLKW (550 Pawtucket) has applied to change calls to WBZU, apparently to match its talk-radio "The Buzz" nickname. WIPS is indeed simulcasting "Radio Lake Placid" (WIRD/WLPW, WRGR). Checking out the AM dial as we sped past Plattsburgh on I-87, we heard a carrier on 1070 transmitting nothing but static, so we don't know what calls or format that poor station is using this week. French-language CHLT (630) is largely a relay of the Radiomedia Network and Montreal's CKAC (730), with four towers south of town in good Canadian fashion. English-speaking listeners (and we didn't find many, even in this formerly Anglophone-heavy region) can tune to CKTS (900), a 24-hour relay of Montreal's CJAD (800) from five towers (gasp!) north of the city. Heading out of Sherbrooke, we crossed back into VERMONT at that dual-nation town of Rock Island/Derby Line, then headed into Newport to see and hear WIKE (1490), in AM stereo with country. Despite e-mail from the station assuring us they were on the air, we heard nothing to suggest that WBNC (1050 Conway) was in fact operating-- in fact, NERW research director Garrett Wollman sat right next to the transmitter on route 113 and heard only silence on 1050.