• Matt Blaze@federate.socialOP
    1·
    7 days ago

    Note, important safety tip: you can get closer to this tower without clearly trespassing or jumping fences than most other 50KW broadcast antennas I’ve encountered. I measured a field strength of over 80V/m a bit outside the tower fence, which is an incredibly strong signal (though still within OSHA limits at the frequency involved).

    Resist any temptation to jump the fence and climb the (energized) tower. You’d be electrocuted as soon as you touch it.

    • Matt Blaze@federate.socialOP
      1·
      7 days ago

      AM broadcast is a technically interesting and somewhat endangered medium. The low frequencies mean that signals routinely travel well beyond their local coverage areas, especially overnight in winter. So there’s a bit of mystery in tuning around the dial late at night; you never know what you might pick up.

      Sadly, industry consolidation and the growth of higher bandwidth media (FM, satellite, podcasts) has greatly reduced the variety and local focus of programming. But it somehow hangs on.

          • David Malone@mastodon.ie
            1·
            7 days ago

            @[email protected] I keep meaning to write something to decode the phase modulated signal on top of the audio, but I’ve never got around to it. Maybe they’ll delay it long enough for me to retire and have enough time to try…

      • Matt Blaze@federate.socialOP
        1·
        7 days ago

        The rapid decline of local content on the mediumwave bands has considerably reduced the romantic mystery of tuning around and seeing what you find. It’s mostly now a sterile mix of mass-produced, syndicated right wing talk, sports, and so on. But there are still a handful of stubbornly local stations producing their own programming.

        • David Goren@toot.community
          1·
          7 days ago

          @[email protected] The graveyard still produce a glorious at night…and this past winter I spent some time Sunset Skipping…and can still hear some local daytime stations in Virginina/Tennesee/North Carolina playing country gospel with local small business ads from my QTH in Brooklyn…but not like it used to be.

          • Matt Blaze@federate.socialOP
            1·
            7 days ago

            @[email protected] I can regularly (in summer, overnight) receive identifiable stations on all but 11 of the MW slots. A few gems in there, but also a lot of monotony. And yes, the local ads are often the best part!

                • David Goren@toot.community
                  1·
                  6 days ago

                  @[email protected]

                  With Big John Trimble! My favorite though was Big John Parker, the weekend guy on the Road Gang…he was what I like call to a “cornball nihilist” He’d come up with these crazy pranks for the truckers to do…like look for the missing hour during the change back to standard time. And he would record the truckers who would call in and then he’d edit the tape to make them say weird things.

                  • David Goren@toot.community
                    0·
                    6 days ago

                    @mattblaze And he was a collector of vintage country music on Sunday mornings between 4-6 AM he had a specialty show called “Country Music the Way It Used to Was.” I"d stay up all night to tape it and would switch over the WRVA to catch The Silver Star Quartet an old school Black Gospel harmony group doing request sfor people who were getting up for church. Caught a few of those on tape.

        • spectrophagus@chaos.social
          1·
          7 days ago

          @[email protected] agreed, and many of those unique, local broadcasters are operating at relatively low power levels, while the QRM from poorly shielded switching electronics gets louder every day.

          kind of feels like MW AM isn’t the only communication medium suffering this kind of SNR degradation lately.

    • AI6YR Ben@m.ai6yr.org
      1·
      7 days ago

      @[email protected] LOL having once been unable to start my car at Mt. Wilson, broadcast radio towers are something else… (had to shift it into neutral and roll downhill out of RF range – it was jamming my third party ignition cutoff burglar alarm)