AM Radio Dx-ing

In late 1967, I was lying in my bed late at night listening to my transistor radio. Back then, almost anything worth listening to on the radio was on the AM band, with FM pretty much relegated to "elevator music" and school-run educational radio. South Florida's AM radio band was full of stations. I was just turning the tuning dial around to find something interesting. WFUN was one of my favorite rock stations, but it was based in South Miami and it's signal was weak at night to pick up. Still, I thought I had tuned it in to its frequency of 790 kilocycles, but a different station was on, and its signal was strong. There was Christian religious programming on it, which I enjoyed listening to. At the station break time, I found out that I was listening to Trans World Radio, broadcasting from the island of Bonaire in the Netherlands Antilles on 800 kc. Well, being a whiz kid in geography, I already knew where that was (in the Caribbean Sea just north of Venezuela) and was astounded that I could pick up a station that far away! So, I fiddled around the dial and came up with other stations like WBT-Charlotte, North Carolina on 1110, WSB-Atlanta, Georgia on 750, and WABC-New York on 770. After that, I began to use our larger, more sensitive family portable radio to pick up stations and began to compile a list. Thus began my hobby of AM dx-ing (dx is an abbreviation for "distance"). That Christmas, my parents went down to the local Walgreens and bought for me an inexpensive Juliette-model table radio. This radio was incredibly receptive! For a few weeks after that, I was adding many new stations to my list of "catches". Then it tapered off until one Sunday night in June, 1968, when I discovered that late Sunday nights, many stations went off the air for equipment testing and repair. Many of the frequencies blocked by strong local stations suddenly became opened up to pick up weaker, distant signals from other stations. Also, I found out that at this time, stations that only operated during daytime hours would come on the air with their equipment tests. That one night I think I picked up more than thirty new stations, and my dx-ing hobby was revitalized.

During that summer, I listened many, many hours at night hoping to pick up new stations. There were some obstacles to this. First, I couldn't understand Spanish then and living in South Florida, the AM radio band was packed with Cuban stations whose signals were overpowering and rarely left the air. Second, sports broadcasts and network shows like NBC Radio's Monitor program kept me from being able to pick up station id's, so I might be hearing a new station without ever knowing it. Third, there are six frequencies on the AM band, called "graveyard frequencies" (1230, 1240, 1340, 1400, 1450, and 1490), where, at night, if no local stations broadcast on them, then the frequency would be a massive jumbled mix of several stations from disparate places. And fourth, the summer of '68 marked the advent of interminably long songs such as Hey Jude, MacArthur Park, Those Were the Days, and Time Has Come Today. When I tuned in to a station that was playing one of these songs, by the time they were over, the station often had faded away and went unidentified. I'd also hear fragments that gave clues to either where a particular station without its call letters was or its call letters without its location. Then, one day I discovered that my father had an electronics hobbyist magazine that listed the U.S. AM stations by frequency! So, I was able to fill in many blanks and amass a couple of hundred stations in my radio log by the end of 1968.

While looking through my father's electronic magazine, I also discovered that dx-ers collected things called "verifications" which were acknowledgements from radio stations, in response to "reception reports" written them by the dx-ers that they were truly received. Usually these verifications took the form of little postcards called QSL-cards (also a hallmark of ham radio). Apparently, dx-ing is kind of like fishing in that if you tell a fellow dx-er (fisherman) that you received a certain station (caught a big fish) then just saying so meant nothing and proof was needed. Starting in 1969 I began to write reception reports and receive QSL's as well, but except for a good friend who shared this fun hobby with me, there was no real reason to keep doing it. I always had this idea in the back of my head, anyway, that, unlike with the case of amateur radio, the people at the radio stations were rather annoyed to receive my reception reports and requests for verification. And also, my enjoyment of dx-ing was personal and for the fun of the station-hunt!

I continued with my AM radio dx-ing off and on until about 1974. I used the same old radio throughout. The farthest station I received was 740-KCBS in San Francisco. I still have my station log book and all of the QSL's.