Comments From Don Payne

"Greetings QSL'ers!" (now THERE'S a familiar greeting! bs)

"As a DJ engineer wanna be (but at least I had a ham license!). And after working at about 20 other statons since then, I realize some stuff was almost paranormal about that signal. For instance-

The audio processing was tweeked to the max by LEROY and jim Loupas..... Two DAPs in series feeding an RCA BTA-50F plate modulation playin the hits! Directional 3 tower array facing North with an ERP of about 300kw.

The thing made some damn noise.

I remember when jocking Beaker Street ...If it kicked off the air at night you would hear a blip of delayed audio about a half second later in the air monitor as the signal propagated all the way aound the earth and hit the receiver. It was probably the most intense RF I've ever seen...Don

Don Payne
Chief Engineer
Radio One of Indiana
Indianapolis"

Don, I have heard fellow Hams talking about unkeying and hearing the last second of their transmission before the other station responded.  I have studied long- and short-path propagation and there's some odd, fun stuff about it.  I have communicated via both ways and found that, at times, the long way was the better way, when I couldn't make the contact via the shortest path.  I don't know why, radio waves just happen thataway.  All I know is, radio, in all it's forms, still amazes me, with all it's quirks and surprises.  Like I said before, radio still contains magic....

Don had some other comments to add:

"After thinking about this for a few days, I remembered that this phenomenon would happen during the antenna pattern switch when we had to drop carrier for a few seconds going from Night to Day pattern. After studying RF and propagation for about 35 years since then, I attribute this to an effect known as “Gray Line Propagation”, a condition that briefly exists at a given location in which it is just getting dark at the reception point simultaneously with the last few minutes of darkness at transmitter point. On the globe, this signal is following the area of darkness at the terminator line that is the line between night and day. This is called the grayline.

This is the only reasonable explanation I can provide. -Don"