"Bill Turner" wrote in message
...
On Fri, 13 Aug 2004 22:27:48 GMT, "Dave Pitzer"
wrote:

I live approx 80 miles from the xmitter of station WABC (New York) 50,000
watts. During the day my reception is good-to-very good. After sunset
however, the signal is poor to unlistenable -- due to fading and man-made
QRM. The stations night-time signal is directional but I live in the
direction of the major lobe. The station advertises covering 27 eastern
US
states at night -- which I don't doubt.

I can receive a Boston station (WBZ, 50k watts) and a Charlotte, NC
station
(WBT, 50k watts)at night loud and clear. Both of these hundreds of miles
from me. (Also get WJR in Detroit and WLS in Chicago loud & clear.)

I seem to be in a "shadow" for the relatively close WABC. I'm using a
high
quality (Sangean) table radio with a built-in ferrite loop antenn. Any
suggestions for improving my WABC night time reception??

Dave Pitzer
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I have the same situation here in California. I'm about 100 miles from
KFI, another 50 kW station, and during the day reception is a bit weak,
but adequate. Come sundown however, reception begins fading and is very
distorted. The reason is that the groundwave portion of the signal is
still present, but is now being interfered with by the skywave portion,
which is not present during the day. If I were to move farther away,
out of groundwave reception, the signal would become much clearer, but
only at night. During daytime it would not be heard at all.

It doesn't matter whether I'm using a home or car radio, the effect is
the same. At night, the clearest stations here are from the San
Francisco area about 400 miles away, but they are inaudible during the
day

One help (which I do use at home) is to listen using an SSB receiver.
The internal BFO in the receiver inserts the sometimes-missing carrier
and improves things a lot, but still not perfect. There are some
high-end shortwave radios available which can be set to work this way
and the improvement is considerable.

Outside of that, using only a radio, not much can be done unless you
want to try diversity reception using automatically switched antennas.
At BCB frequencies this takes lots of real estate since the antennas
have to be separated quite a bit to be effective.

If you want to skip the radio completely (at home) and you have high
speed internet access, many radio stations have streaming audio
available. I suppose in time this will be available in cars too.

--
Bill, W6WRT
QSLs via LoTW


This would account for the strange undulating "out of phase" sound -- with
the ground and sky waves canceling and reinforcing in a random manner.

Seems to me that there is not much use having 50k watts if the signal in the
station's market area is virtually unlistenable. Then again, most of the
commercials at night are "national", not "local".

DP
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