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Sunday, August 7, 2005
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 Sunday, August 7, 2005
started 8/7/2005; 4:21:40 AM - last post 8/7/2005; 4:21:40 AM
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Doc Searls - Sunday, August 7, 2005 
8/7/2005; 8:21:40 AM (reads: 5104, responses: 0)
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Prairie radio 
| | Dave checks in from Fargo this morning. For Dave and other readers motoring across the northern prairie, I recommend listening to local (or regional) programming on AM radio, especially at the lower end of the dial. KFYR/550 out of Bismark (ND) and WNAX/570 out of Yankton (SD) cover more ground in the U.S. by day than any other stations in the country. And both are only 5,000 watts. CBK/540 in Watrous, Saskatchewan, is 50,000 watts and holds the same title for Canada (with a signal that goes down pretty far into the U.S.). |
| | They owe their coverage to low dial positions (where the waves are longer and stick to the ground for much greater distances than do signals higher up the dial), and to high ground conductivities in the fertile soils of the prairie. The FCC's M3 map, developed many decades ago (when AM was the only band in the U.S.), shows a ground conductivity of 30 mhos/meter for most of North Dakota and Kansas, and also much of Nebraska, Oklahoma, Texas and Illinois. There's nothing like it on the East Coast, and the same values only show up in a few parts of the West Coast (e.g. Bay Area and Central Valley). Long Island and Atlanta have ground conductivities of 0.5. |
| | So stations like KFYR and WNAX concern themselves with enormous geographies, and the farm economies that still prevail there. |
| | At night, by the way, conditions change enormously. Signals bounce off the F layer of the ionosphere, and back to earth, often without interference, for up to hundreds of miles away from the transmitter. Scan the dial at night from places in the prairie and you'll hear "clear channel" stations from Chicago (WSCR/670, WGN/720, WLS/890), St. Louis (KMOX/1120), Salt Lake City (KSL/1160), and even Boston (WBZ/1030) New York (WFAN/660, WABC/770 and WCBS/880) and San Francisco (KNBR/680). Up until the 1960s, these were among a couple dozen "Clear Channel" stations, occupying channels that were otherwise clear at night. This provided nighttime service to rural parts of the country. Country music established itself in the Southeast, thanks to WSM/650 out of Nashville. |
| | Growing up in Napoleon, North Dakota, in the 1920s and 1930s, my mother's family used to listen to WNAX and KFYR in the daytime and various Chicago stations at night. All were many miles away. |
| | By the way, the company known as Clear Channel was named after its flagship station, WOAI/1200 in San Antonio. |
| | [Later...] From the Dept. of Repetition Dept.: After I wrote this post, I had a feeling I wrote something very similar not too long ago. And sure enough I did: right here — the last time Dave drove through North Dakota. |
Beyond the numbers game
levart
| | I'm uploading a pile of photos from the plane trips I took yesterday (from Portland to Los Angeles) and a few days earlier (from Los Angeles to Portland). These are loading in reverse order, so if you start here and click on "next", you an take the trip with me, backwards, with a view toward Los Angeles, the Sierra Madres, the Central Valley, and a long series of volcanoes, to Portland, and back. |
| | As I'm writing this, the upload has arrived Southwest of Yosemite, at a faraway view of Fresno. |
| | To complicate this, my uploader insists on tagging everything, requiring that I (someday) remove them all by hand. Also, since this blog is on Atlantic time, and I'm on Pacific, I'm writing this at 8:30 yesterday (blog time) evening. The round trip happened on Monday and Friday. |
| | Anyway, they were great trips for window sitting, even though the view was pretty hazy in both directions. |
| | [Later...] Of course, the uploader failed somewhere in mid-trip. Found that out in the morning, when I went with a different uploader, which uploads pix in reverse order. That one is still chugging away. In any case, the trip is now less continuous than I would have liked. O well... |
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