robert casey wrote:


No doubt. But most of the serious 80M dxers in those days ran
"suds", a
lotta power, not just a lotta power but 'WAY too much power. Back
then
the max allowable power was one kW input vs. today's 1.5kW output.

Have heard what is likely an urban legend of a ham (who was
also a broadcast chief engineer) using the 50KW AM transmitter in his
charge to work some rare DX on some HF ham band. Late at
night when it was off for maintenance. Seems unlikely as the
power amp would have circuits tuned for the MW AM broadcast
station's frequency and low pass filters to block harmonics
in the SW spectrum. That's not something one can modify
in a few minutes.

It would be pretty easy to pull off so it wouldn't surprise at all me
if somebody really did put an AM b'cast station on 160.

Oh, you could connect a ham transceiver to the broadcast
antenna tower to work some 160m DX, but that would be
legal.

A similar stunt absoulutely was pulled off and I know the parties very
well. There were two young hotshot DX conetesters back around 1965,
Paul WA3FFR and his buddy Doug whose call I can't remember. Paul was an
EE co-op student engineer at my alma mater and worked at the USCG
electronics labs in Cape May NJ. Doug was a CG ensign or maybe a Lt JG
and worked with Paul. Those labs were the headquarters for the vast
USCG Loran system which operated on 160 along with the hams who could
find holes in the Loran QRM. Paul and Doug decided to put a Loran
antenna system to work in a 160 DX contest. And they did. They blew the
lid off the band and came up with a score which which rewrote the 160M
dxing record book, worked something like 68 countries in one
weekend.'Ole Stew Perry never knew what hit him. Unthinkable back then
and not bad at all even today.

w3rv