Are there youngsters who still carry Radios to bed with them, to listen beneath the covers to distant voices and Music streaming in from far-away places over the AM dial?
I did when I was a boy. Sometimes I still do.
Before the Internet, before cable TV, before cheap long-distance telephone service, there was something magical about listening to broadcasts from exotic places such as St. Louis, Chicago and New York City -- particularly to a boy lying in the dark in his bedroom 30 miles from the waters of the Gulf of Mexico.
I heard first-hand reports of unimaginably cold temperatures registered at O'Hare Airport ... traffic backups on Riverside Parkway--at 5 in the morning! ... impending garbage strikes ... and similar bits and pieces of northern/urban exotica that were unknown in my southern Alabama world. Why, sometimes I even managed to pick up stations from the real frozen north--Canada.
When darkness falls and atmospheric conditions are right, it's still fun to travel up and down the AM dial seeking out distant Radio stations. People who do this as a hobby are called AM dx'ers, dx being an old Radio term for distance.
Distance isn't everything, though. Sometimes you can get more of a thrill from snagging a small, low-powered station situated in the next county over, if you are outside its normal broadcast footprint, than you do from hearing a 50,000-watt station blasting its blowtorch of a signal from halfway across the country.
All you need to give AM dx'ing a try is a Radio, the spirit of the chase, and persistence. The good catches don't spring loud and clear from out of the static and noise. You often have to dial in tiny increments to find a distant or weak station, then make micro-adjustments to try to hold it there, at least long enough to catch a station ID or a location. It helps if the Radio you're using has a fine-tuning knob as well as a main tuning dial.
Some Radios, of course, are much better than others for AM dx'ing. It's generally agreed that the best set for this purpose is an ugly old boxy looking thing called the GE Super Radio. Still in production (with mostly minor model changes) more than three decades after it was introduced, it is relatively inexpensive and engineered specially for outstanding AM reception.
Most any AM Radio, though, will receive at least some far-off stations after dark. Having not yet subscribed to satellite Radio, I particularly enjoy listening to distant cities on my car Radio while driving places at Night.
If you become addicted to dx'ing the AM dial, you'll want to keep a log of your catches. This can simply be a notepad you keep next to the Radio. Jot down the frequencies and call letters, if you can, of the stations you hear, along with the date and time. Use this information to look up your catches on the Web, where you can find out more information, such as their broadcast power, studio and transmitter locations, normal broadcast range, station history and more.
There's magic in the airwaves toNight. Why not tune in some of it for yourself?
Stefan Smith is a Radio junkie who writes on entertainment and related subjects for the Solid Gold Info Writers Consortium. Recently, he has written an extensive review of amazing new software anyone can use to capture Music audio streams from Internet Radio broadcasts and break them up into individual mp3 song files--a legal way to download virtually free Music. Read the review at: http://www.solid-gold.info/Radio2mp3.html
Author:: Stefan Smith
Keywords:: Radio,Dxing,am Radio,streaming audio,Broadcasting,Music,Night,Nighttime,Night owls
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