780 Bounty

The following announcement appeared on the IRCA mail list Saturday:

“With special thanks to Chief Engineer Daniel Appellof, and Broadcaster/DX’er Paul Walker, we have arranged for a DX Test tonight for KKOH 780 Khz in Reno, Nevada. At approximately midnight Pacific time, KKOH will switch to 50 KW Non-directional. They plan to run 15-20 minutes of DX Test material that we have provided.

“This material includes sweep tones, Morse Code IDs at 700 hz (10 words per minute), telephone off-hook sounds, and vintage voice sounders for the station. The sweep tones and telephone sounders are especially good at cutting through noise, and should give many DX’ers a chance to log the station. 

“After the test period, KKOH 780 will power down the transmitter for additional maintenance. This will provide a ‘silent period’ for West Coast DX’ers to log new stations on 780 Khz.”

WBBM in Chicago dominates 780 here and I did not think I would hear anything but WBBM if I got up at 3 AM local time to hear the test. But as luck would have it, the cat woke me up at 2:50 AM and since I was up, I went to the radio shack, turned on the IC-8600, tuned to 780 and at 07:59 UTC, turned on the recorder function of the 8600.

WBBM was loud and clear as usual, although it did experience two deep fades during the 20 minutes of  monitoring 780, but the fades did not help me hear much from KKOH. However, when WBBM was at full strength, I did copy Morse code from KKOH at 08:05:00 UTC.

Then from about 08:07:30 on, Radio Coro was very copyable playing salsa music under WBBM.

So it was a very productive morning – a new state and a new country in the log. KKOH in Reno, transmitting 50,000 watts, 2429 miles to the west and Radio Coro in Coro, Venezuela, transmitting 15,000 watts 2079 miles to the south.

I was continuously switching between antennas during the test and I heard the KKOH Morse code on the 80-meter dipole and Radio Coro on both the dipole and the 60-foot Loop on Ground (LoG) antenna.