Late-nite DXing

[A. Joseph Ross]

On 23 Feb 2008 at 19:50, Cohasset / Hippisley wrote:

> For the next 4-1/2 years there was hardly a night I didn't go to sleep
> listening to AM broadcast band "DX" on my little 5-tuber.  Somewhere I
> still have the reception log I kept.  I lived in the Finger Lakes of
> upstate NY, and my only local station went off the air before
> midnight.  After sundown the Syracuse stations (with patterns that
> generally protected stations in my direction from them) were
> non-players, so the closest nighttime Top Pop stations I normally
> tuned in were WKBW, WPTR, and WMEX.  During the day, my #1 choice was
> the quite conservative Top 40 format and delivery of Syracuse's WFBL
> "Big Six" announcers on 1390 kHz.  
 
When I was in high school, someone showed me a trick that works on 
most of the later-model 5-tube radios with miniature tubes and 
printed circuits.  I never could get it to work on the earlier 5-tube 
radios with larger tubes and hand-wired circuits, not could I do it 
with solid-state radios.

What you would do was connect a length of wire, about two to three 
yards (shorter or longer didn't work as well) across the terminals of 
the loop antenna.  That would cause the radio to receive shortwave 
signals from about the  six to eleven megahertz bands. Reception 
wasn't great, but you could get the large broadcasters, such as the 
BBC, Swiss Radio International, Radio Deutsche Welle, and most of the 
Iron Curtain countries.  I did that for some time, in college and 
into law school until I got a regular shortwave radio.  

-- 
A. Joseph Ross, J.D.                           617.367.0468
 92 State Street, Suite 700                   Fax 617.507.7856
Boston, MA 02109-2004           	         http://www.attorneyross.com