by jon » Mon Dec 12, 2011 10:52 am
I'm a bit confused about my first listening to a distant station. Because I can't place a date on one early incident.
I began listening to CFUN in early 1962. When our extended family visited the Seattle Worlds Fair in November of the same year, my parents wanted me to buy me a small transistor radio. To demonstrate it to this 10 year old, the salesman set it to KJR. When I got home to Burnaby, I was able to listen to KJR-950 on my parents radio quite a bit, but the little transistor did not do a good enough job of getting rid of CKNW-980 slop.
The one incident that I cannot positively date as being after this, though it undoubtedly was, is tuning across the dial on my parents' radio and hearing Stan Freburg's weekly show, one of the last stand-alone (no TV simulcast) network radio shows. It was near the bottom of the dial, so I now suspect it was on KVI-570 Seattle.
I'm a little fuzzy on how my DX expanded, in distance, from California into the U.S. mid-West, until I got WWL-870 in New Orleans. Although my DXing was initially done on my parents Philips mid-1950s transistor radio, I actually got WWL on the little transistor radio once. WWL was 50,000 watts, but they had a directional pattern to avoid wasting their signal on the Gulf of Mexico, and pushed the equivalent of 75-100KW in my direction.
Then one evening just after 8pm when my parents had guests and I was banished to my bedroom, I heard WNBC-660, WABC-770 and WCBS-880, all from New York City, all coming in very well. They did not remain my most distant "catches" for long, as I then heard WBZ-1030 in Boston, which instantly became my favourite Top 40 listening. When I could hear them, of course. Mainly because they were playing the hits first, before any other station I could hear.
WBZ remained "most distant" for quite a while, until I started getting Cuban stations. It would be about 1967 before I could afford a communications receiver -- the same model shown in my avatar -- and I had built a 4 foot box loop antenna to go with it. That opened an entire new world. South America, the South Pacific, and even the Pacific Coast of Asia. All on 540-1600KHz. Yet, at the time, I still considered my best "catch" to be the CBC repeater in Banff. Doesn't sound like far away, but with 40 watts, I thought it rated the designation. I still have the QSL card and the audio recording.
I quit DX'ing completely in 1971, just months before a Seattle DX friend heard England and Africa. I've really only "dabbled" since.