QSL from KRMG Tulsa OK 740 AM

This one blew my socks away. KRMG in Tulsa verified by email,  with Levi May, Programme Director, saying...."LOVE THIS! I can confirm 100% this is KRMG. 8800 miles!  That is just incredible. Graham, thank you for sending this over.  You have made my week." Picking out KRMG from our recordings made my week, too! It looks like there is a secondary night-time lobe aimed east, but not really in our direction, with the primary lobe heading out west. How did that 25kW signal get to Cape Point, I wonder? Oklahoma stations are rare in this neck of the woods and I'm pretty sure this is a first here, although we don't have good records of this. In the clip you can hear a bit of weather and then the station cue including their FM frequency. There's co-channel interference from the big Brazilian, Sociedade da Bahia, which can sometimes be heard here on a car radio. Close by on 729 AM is Cape Pulpit Radio, a local station, which can produce a lot of splash but was relatively quite on this occasion.

QSL Radio Absoluta Campos dos Goytacazes RJ AM 1470

This is from Radio Absoluta in Campos dos Goytacazes, Rio de Janeiro state, Brazil, about 3700 miles away. The station is rated with just 1 kW and came in a couple of times during our January dxpedition. They sent a kind of QSL, more like an acknowledgement of a report and audio clip put up on Facebook. Certainly not one of those formal, full data QSLs that were so popular in earlier times for dxing but better than a stony silence! Station played some pleasant Brazilian romantic pop and the recording has a nice clear ID and frequency.

QSL WMTR Morristown NJ AM 1250

Glenn Hauser of World of Radio fame (see his DX Listening Digest out every week), spurred me to start posting some audio files on my blog. It turns out this is quite easy to do using Soundcloud. As a starter, the attached audio clip is from WMTR, Morristown, NJ on AM 1250, using 7 kW night-time power, heard at Cape Pt, near here, 7800 miles from the  station. The station has a Classic Oldies format, very unusual these days, targeting the New York metro area. On the clip you can hear the end of "Daydream Believer" by The Monkees (1968) followed by the station cue. Mark Mitchell at the station commented wryly per email "...since we have to null our signal to the west at night, you actually cannot hear our groundwave about 15 miles west of here, within the same county!" An interesting piece of radio trivia is that Samuel Morse did his inventing of the famous code right there in Morristown, in 1836, so a long radio history for the town.

QSL KVCE Highland Park TX 1160 AM

KVCE verified my report of 4 July, 2017 per email. I had quite a long exchange with Ronda Kay at the station, explaining about verifications and QSLs and she kindly responded with a QSL. The station was using a religious format at the time and a night-time power of just 1 kW. This is one of my furthest 1 kW verifications and is not one of the  x-banders higher up the AM scale, where more very low-powered transmitters tend to be heard. The distance is close to 8800 miles. Since then the call letters have changed to KBDT. The night-time pattern is pointed more or less in my direction. The station ID was 'The Word 100.7 FM', which is the sister station, KWRD. K-letter stations are special here because they tend to be so far away. The  station cue is clear on the attached clip.

QSL WTAR Norfolk VA 850 AM

This one is from WTAR Norfolk VA, 7800 miles (12500 km) from Cape Point. The QSL was from very friendly Dave Morgan, who is the engineer for this station and also WNIS. Dave actually alerted me to listening out for WTAR on AM 850. In the past I'd been so used to hearing the more powerful 50 kW WEEI Boston with its sports format that I didn't think to distinguish WTAR with its sports format on the same channel. In fact, WEEI is affiliated to ESPN while WTAR is with FOX Sports. WTAR puts out 25 kW at night more or less in our direction. Subsequently, WTAR has come in here quite often.

QSL CJBC Toronto ON 860 AM

OK reactivating this blog. For the time being I'll be posting QSLs that I've received since the start of 2017. That was when I stared using my Excalibur Pro and long Beverage-on-the-ground antennae to listen to AM station, mainly in the Americas and Australia. The place we go to is near Cape Point, south of Cape Town, South Africa, where the level of electronic interference is low.

The  first one to post is CJBC on AM 860. This is a 50 kW non-directional signal produced by Radio Canada for French listeners in the Toronto area. It was the first time I've heard this here but since then it has come in on numerous occasions. Nice to hear a bit of French from the Americas!

This was my 33rd Canadian AM QSL and the first since 2006!

Distance = 8100 miles or 13100 km.

Radio St Helena, revisited

Just returned from Swakopmund in Namibia, where we hung out with our son, who flies tourists around that amazing country, from game lodge to game lodge. Namibia's population is about half of Cape Town's and the country is twice the size of Germany. The topography is spectacular, albeit phenomenally arid. Swakop is a civilised coastal town of less than 50k people. It's supposed to be the 'watering hole' Namibia, with crowds descending on the place over the summer holiday season. While the population certainly expanded, it was still remarkably genteel. You don't have the crowds you see in Hermanus and Plettenberg Bay, or the traffic jams. Our trip reminded me of another sojourn in Swakop nearly 30 years ago. I persuaded my wife to accompany me and we flew via Windhoek. My main goal was to hear St Helena Radio, then just a 1kW power AM transmitter on the island in the mid-Atlantic, target of many dxers over the years. I knew nothing about Swakop but found a place called the 'A-frame cottages' right on the edge of town. I managed to negotiate that we had one at one end of a row of about 6 or 7. Brazenly, I strung up a length of copper wire out from our cottage and down the entire row, about 100 metres. I spent many happy hours dxing at night. This was 1987, when electronic noise was still in its infancy, especially in an out of the way place like Swakop. One evening St Helena Radio came in: weak but clear as a bell. One thing I clearly remember was, after the news, a classified ads programme with someone offering a Morris Minor for sale. I sent a detailed reception report to the station which would have gone from Cape Town via the ship which left periodically to Jamestown. And in due course I received this excellent letter from Anthony Leo, station engineer. He mentions that I had picked them up in South Africa, when in fact I'd said South-West Africa but I guess many people didn't know the difference, or care, even though independence for Namibia was just around the corner. We visited the A-frames again on this trip and, looking at the rows of cottages, I can't believe I was able to get away with stringing that copper wire down the row. I wouldn't have managed it today, I'm sure.