I had been interested in radios since my preteens years starting out with my
father's old 5 tube Motorola plastic table set. You could pick up old consoles
and tabletops in those days for at most 10 bucks, they had been moved to the
cellar or the garage to make room for TV and sometimes they'd give them to you
just to get rid of them. I blew up quite a few in various ways. I can first
remember DXing with a crystal radio I got for Christmas sometime around 1965 at
the age of about 12, I also had a 15 watt mono tube amp I had put together from
a Radio shack kit, the amp sounded pretty good actually. I of course hooked the
crystal radio to it and picked up The Voice of America which was quite strong
in those day. Starting playing in rock n roll bands for quite a few years so
radios took a back seat until I hit about 18 or 19 when I traded a friend a
Panasonic 8 track player for a 1937 RCA 811K console radio which is still an
excellent radio for DXing and it sounded good to boot!
. I moved this radio every everywhere I went from several different
apartments, I became a shortwave listener for several years until I brought
home a book called Popular Electronics (I think) and it had a MW guide in it
(White's Log I think) and explained the rudiments of BCB DXing, I had never
thought of it up until that point. By this time I was living in Worcester MA in
the Grafton st area on a hill, I took about 400' of spliced together copper
wire and ran it across a schoolyard and down to a tree, I hooked an old pair of
headphones to it and decided to try this BCB DXing. I fired up the old RCA and
started scanning the band, I started at about 7 pm, my girl friend and a few
others all went out to a local club and thought I was nuts when they got home
again at two am and I was still sitting in the same position! Anyway I did
pretty well that night, got lots of clears latter in the evening but the crown
jewel of that night for me was sitting on 1160 and hearing just tha!
t sound when you know there is no other station on that same frequency
for thousands of miles. I waited and started hearing some faint swirling noise
in the background, just below the noise floor, it came up slowly and within
twenty minutes it was KSL Salt Lake City Utah, got a pos. ID at 1pm and was
thrilled, I knew just about how far Salt Lake City was and that was in very far
corner of our land. Anyway I got hooked that night and soon bought an HRO-60
which netted me many more stations, splits and Caribbeans. I remember getting
Germany 1593 on that radio with a small loop. Turn the loop another way I would
get RJR Jamaica on I think 720, I got a couple of other Jamaicans semi
regularly too. I remember getting an Alabama day timer right as he was getting
ready to shut down or off. Some of the semi regulars here back then were WBAP
820 and WSM Nasville I joined the NRC around 1980 for a few years lost
interest and joined again about 6 or 7 years ago just in time for the IBOC mess
and was surprised at how crowded the bands were, no more real !
clears. I mostly DX TA's BCB and LW now I'm lazy about IDing them so don't
often email them to the reflector, I do pretty good here some nights though
with my long wires, my phaser and my boatanchors. My three favorite radios for
DXing are in no particular order, A Collins designed (Capeheart) R-390A, a
Hammarlund SP-600 and a pristine National HRO-50R1
Bob Young
KB1OKL
Millbury, MA
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