I Caught My Target!

Hopefully, the "grey line" post didn't bore anyone- maybe enthused some of us to hunt for and log stations a little more frequently, maybe? As an addendum to that, if you're trying to hear a station on a particular frequency, if one station goes off where it is dark, you can sometimes hear another station on the same frequency that is still on the lighted side of the "grey line".

Needless to say, I also mentioned chasing after a station on 1550 AM. Well, I got up early this morning, grabbed my headphones and a portable reciever and went to breakfast! I heard a partial i.d. of "FM 98, 1550 AM", "Scott Shannon" and later, "True Oldies Channel", although the latter had to come by me a couple of times before I understood "channel".

Well, thank God for the Internet (no, NOT Al Gore!) and I was off on a chase. I finally found the only station that broadcast on both 98.1 FM and 1550 AM, WLOR in Huntsville, AL! This coincides with the way I had to orient my radio, so that the signal was coming from due north. Here's some information on the station via Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WLOR_(AM)

What was so amazing to me is that its mentioned that WLOR cuts their power to only 44 watts at night!

Here's more information about the True Oldies Channel:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/True_Oldies_Channel

and

http://www.trueoldieschannel.com/

So far, what I could hear is pretty good stuff...and they mention streaming on the 'web as well!

I have two radios I like to take with me and chase Mediumwave DX: a Realistic DX-440 (which was made by Sangean for Tandy Corp., the original being Sangean's ATS-803A), which is an AM/FM/shortwave receiver, and a Sony CFS-43 an AM/FM boombox with great speakers! When I want a little more diversity, I'll use both radios and tune the same station...sometimes, when the signal fades on one, it'll stay up, or keep better audio on the other. Sometimes, the trick is the loopstick antenna inside the radio- the bigger, the better!

When KAAY was in their Top 40 days, it only took a small pocket receiver to hear their signal- and, with 50,000 watts of power, sometimes that receiver would try and jump out of your pocket! One friend of mine would listen at night, especially to Beaker Street; he was eating 9-volt batteries, so he built a variable 9-volt power supply and listened all night, every night! Well, his mom came in one morning, saw the radio was on and thought she'd turn off the power supply instead of the radio. Needless to say, she turned the power UP on the power supply instead and burned his radio up! Gone was his listening for a while....

The bottom line is that it was refreshing to hear rock-n-roll on an AM station again! Now, my next challenge is to maybe experiment with a better antenna system to drag that signal in....

Bud S. (staceys4@hotmail.com)