Any DXers here?

[bruiser]

How many of you would wait until the sun went down, the ionosphere came out, and the sky waves started rolling, and started tuning across the AM dial to see what stations you could pick up? I certainly did that, and heard dozens of distant stations. I listened to WLS, WCKY, WSIX, WLAC, WJJD, WOWI, WSB, WSM, and plenty more, including the border station XERF. I heard John R on WLAC, and a guy I don't remember on XERF selling everything you could think of. I also heard the last of the radio shows that were on at that time, including Inner Sanctum, The Whistler, The Lone Ranger, Dragnet, and several more. I heard Dick Biondi and Art Roberts on WLS. Biondi at that time was arguably the #1 dj in the country. WLS would aim their signal , I think it was something like a hemishpere shaped pattern, right down through the midwest, and the signal would fan out over most of the US except for the west and east coast areas. Sometimes I still DX the dial to see what's out there. Not much music, but a lot of talk and sports.

[Mike Griffin]

I found books in my Jr High library about radio in 1963. From then on I was always restoring old TVs and Radios or junking them for parts. With the parts I built amplifiers, Radios, and Transmitters.

I DXed the AM band with the radios I built and would listen to many of the stations Bruser mentioned. My favorites were WLS, WCFL, and WABC. Later I became interested in talk stations WCAU, WBZ, and KDKA.

One of my favorite things to build was a Hartley oscillator running in the AM band and using it as a crude transmitter. I would plate modulate it and hook it to a big antenna, put some albums on the record changer and head off down the street with a transistor radio to see how far it would go. Usually not too far, but that was probably good. This was my first experience at being a DJ. By the way, I almost always used 6V6 tubes one for the oscillator and one for the modulator. The modulator usually used a 12AX7 as a two stage preamp. Often I would nail tube sockets to a piece of plywood and do the wiring on the surface.

I also loved listening to FM, although I didn't get any outside of the area until much later when I learned to build stacked dipoles and yagi's. My FM listening was mostly WKLO and some things on the library station. I recall hearing 'Tom's Magic Garden' read and enjoying it a lot. At 14 I wouldn't have told my friends, nevertheless I tuned in everyday for it.

Back to DX, one of my best memories is of building my first crystal radio. Actually it used a 1N34A germanium diode rather than the traditional crystal/cat-wisker. It had a high-Q coil and hooked to a long antenna I was able to pull in WLS.

Another thing about crystal radios in New Albany Indiana, if I used a low-Q coil I got an extremely high quality signal from WKLO. I remember playing a crystal radio hooked to a HiFi amplifier and a speaker array made of four 6x9 speakers junked from cars in a large enclosure. The sound was great, bass good, it was wonderful. An aunt was visiting and was surprised that it sounded better than her console stereo. By the way she was a huge WAKY fan.

Then there was shortwave - I had a Knight Kit Spanmaster (one of the worst shorwave recievers ever made). My mother wouldn't let me send to Radio Moscow to request a QSL card. I couldn't understand it. I guess in the early 60's the memories of the McCarthy stuff was still pretty fresh.

Then CB, in 1964 I got on the air on CB for about a year. Lots of fun. No money, an old unit, no license, and about 50' of AC zip cord for transmission line then into a wire antenna. Got good signal reports from all round Louisville and Southern Indiana.

That's my wicked past. Now I hack computers for a living.