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Re: Sunday, February 26, 2006
The ICF-2001 wasn't just good. It was among the best of all time, at AM & FM as well as SW. Sussex County is the northernmost in New Jersey, and our house was on the far side of the hill slope, facing away from D.C. This favored stations from upstate NY, CT, even MA. Got a lot of Boston, when the conditions were right. The receiver also wasn't great: an old KLH. But it did the job very nicely. In North Carolina I was in the midst of rolling hills, but at least not in a valley. Although we were 220 air miles from WAMU's transmitter, I could get the signal on my portable radios. One was the Nordmende Globetraveller Jr., a great German radio with a teak case and dials on the topl The other was the first digital boom box, made by GE. In those days, the only signals on 88.5 were WAMUs and WFDD's, from Winston-Salem. WAMU was (and still is) 50kw @ 500 feet, the limit for stations in the rust belt. WFDD's was 36kw at 300 feet. It was only 90 miles away, but also 90 degrees to the west of WAMU's signal, so even with a whip antenna, it was easy to null out WFDD. Now WXPN in Phily is on 88.5, and WFDD is 60kw at 900 feet. There are other locals crowded in all over the place as well. FM DXing is pretty much a Thing of the Past everywhere not utterly rural. And there's not much point anymore, now that we have Internet and satellite radio. When we went up and down the road to Mt. Baldy yesterday, we listened to Sirius all the way. Suddenly I'm impatient and even frustrated with the formely charming DXy qualities of stations one or two area codes away. End of an era. There are responses to this message:
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