Re: WQEW

[mwaters@wesleyan.edu (Martin J. Waters)]

>Joe Ross wrote:
<snip>
>While in my car this evening, I was surprised to get a strong signal from
>WQEW around 6:55 PM, when the sun hadn't set yet.  For some reason, WNTN
>1550 was not on the air.  A few minutes later, WQEW had faded and become
>rather faint.

        Not surprising, really. The short-wave comparisons really are not
too far off. If you don't have adjacent channel interference, the
clear-channel stations in the 1500s start putting up significant skywave
signals two hours or more before sunset. Last summer, I was getting WQEW
very loud on skywave in central Vermont (with no adjacent-channel stations
around) starting around two hours before sunset and could hear a
significant skywave three hours before sunset. It thundered in as the
strongest AM signal from NYC until the others caught up to it at sunset or
later. At noon, however, with just groundwave, WQEW up there was a tiny
whisper you could barely tell was there while WCBS was pretty good. I
wondered whether in December you might get skywave from WQEW up there all
day long. This past winter, in Connecticut, I heard WWKB give its noontime
ID. And it was somewhat better than a minimal signal you could barely hear.
In January, in Scituate, I had WTOP on the car radio at 1 p.m., so loud it
was slopping onto WNRB. Down here, WNRB comes in best in this pre-sunset /
post-sunrise period, even though there's a daytimer on 1500 about 15 miles
from me. At night, WNRB down here has the same problem as it does in the
Boston area -- too much signal from WTOP and WWKB.
        The expanded band will be interesting when we get some more
stations on it closer to the Northeast. The 10 kW signals just before
sunset and after sunrise ought to produce good skywaves. The best reception
I have gotten from the one in Alabama has been when it was running 10 kW
just before its sunset.

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