CBEF on air on 1550

[andysradio]

Noted this morning CBEF in French from Windsor on 1550 in parallel to weaker 540.

[Shawndx]

Yes heard them In Winnipeg last night dominating the frequency

[jon]

Thanks for the tip, Shawn. I'll try for them here in Edmonton. When I checked 1550 last week, it was the usual battle between the two Washington state stations, but nothing else.

In the mid-1960s, when I started DX'ing in Vancouver, the CBC ran 24/7 leaving CBE-1550 all alone on the frequency after midnight on Sunday nights. As a result, despite their 10KW and a directional pattern (same day and night) that sends a lot less than 10,000 watts towards Vancouver, they were usually the first Ontario station DX'ers heard on the West Coast. Of course, that all changed when the CBC dropped 24 hour broadcasting around 1968, opening up a lot of great Ontario frequencies, most notably 740 and 1010.

I'm assuming that CBEF is still running that directional pattern and 10KW.

[Toomas Losin]

the CBC dropped 24 hour broadcasting around 1968

Oh! I didn't know the CBC had been 24/7 back then. When CBU signed off at 01:00 local I could hear XTRA 690, so CBC going 24/7 sometime in the early 90's (?) annoyed me.

[jon]

the CBC dropped 24 hour broadcasting around 1968

Oh! I didn't know the CBC had been 24/7 back then. When CBU signed off at 01:00 local I could hear XTRA 690, so CBC going 24/7 sometime in the early 90's (?) annoyed me.

Only really good thing about it (CBC 24/7 in the mid-1960s) was that I heard a lot of B.C. LPRTs Sunday nights after midnight when everyone else was off the air for transmitter maintenance.

As for XETRA-690, with CBU only running 10KW, you could hear XETRA pretty well underneath quiet music passages (CBC's AM network played lots of music back then) and gentler talk programming. I believe that there were sunrise and sunset directional pattern changes by CBU in those days, which also provided a few seconds of XETRA.

Plus, transmitters of individual CBC stations still need periodic maintenance, and it was normally done after midnight Sunday nights, so CBU, for example, still was off the air for a few hours a couple of times a month.

I could look it up, but, from memory, I believe that 24/7 CBC-AM programming began with the Cuban Missile Crisis of the early 1960s, and again with the first Gulf War of the early 1990s. Those two "incidents" are the only times that some normally calm friends actually worried about nuclear missiles heading their way. In my lifetime, that is. Nearly everyone was scared in World War II.