Out with the Old, In (the Log) with the New

WFME (50,000 watts on 1560 kHz in NYC) recently announced that it was going off the air. For days, it repeated a 15-minute loop of religious programming and an announcement about its impending demise.

Over the weekend, rumor was that they were pulling the plug Monday morning, so while I did this and that in the shack, I had the IC-R8600 tuned to 1560. After the loop played again at 11:15 EST, there was a brief generic station identification followed by dead air. WFME was gone.

I listened to 1560 for something new switching between the four antennas connected to the IC-R8600, but heard nothing. At sunset, it was a different story – there were two or three stations fighting it out and I managed to identify one of them as a new entry in the log: gospel music station WGLB in Elm Grove, Wisconsin transmitting 250 watts, 775 miles to the north-northwest.

I did not identify the other stations and will try again tonight.

Mid-February Report

Conditions have been good and bad and even when they are good, I only managed to log two new AM stations since my last post.

WAKM on 960 kHz transmitting 75 watts, 848 miles to the southwest from Franklin, Tennessee.

WSSV on 1160 kHz transmitting 575 watts, 97 miles to the north-northwest from Mechanicsville, New York.

Both were heard with my ICOM IC-R8600 receiver, WAKM with my ICOM AH-7000 discone antenna and WSSV with my 128-foot Loop on Ground (LoG) antenna.

Nine years ago, I logged WPQH451 on my Subaru’s radio from my employer’s parking lot in Wallingford, CT. WPQH451 is a 10-watt traffic information station located in Rocky Hill, CT that I could never hear from home until recently. Don't know if they made some equipment changes or what, but now I can hear WPQH451 all the time 14 miles from my home station on Compounce Mountain in Wolcott, CT.