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Medium Wave DXing Fifty Five Years In

medium wave dxing

No, that’s not me on the left, but close. I just realized that last year was my 55th anniversary in my first hobby of medium wave DXing.

It all started in junior high school. You may recall the days when power failures led to local broadcasters going “off the air”. These days, everyone has backup power generators, but not during the 1960’s.

One morning in the mid 60’s, when I was having breakfast and listening to a battery powered radio, a winter storm turned off the power. All the local AM stations went silent. But I discovered a world of other stations coming through in the silence. Soon, I learned that if I tuned between the locals, distant broadcasters came through.

Soon after, I discovered this was actually a hobby called medium wave DXing. I also stumbled across a club dedicated to this kind of thing and some members lived just down the street. So, I joined CIDX which, amazingly, is still around.

We used to send signal reports to stations heard and receive verifications from the station engineer, called QSL cards. I collected cards from 50 states and all 10 provinces. Unfortunately, I have lost these over the years. Hams still collect QSL cards, but mainly electronic ones now.

Back when I started, most of the radios used wide ceramic filters, so selectivity was poor. But Winnipeg was a great location for medium wave DXing being centrally located in North America. We used to hear the powerhouse Mexican broadcasters as well as both US coasts from New York to California. My favorite station over the 1970’s was WLS, the Rock of Chicago on 890 kHz.

Medium Wave DXing Today

Fast forward 55 years, and my SDR receivers and wideband loop array got me back into medium wave DXing. Sadly, the band is full of too many pathetic talk radio shows, but that’s life. Calgary is not as good as Winnipeg, though, for hearing the east coast. But, you can hear some Asian stations across the Pacific – no mean feat from the Canadian prairies.

My new ANAN-7000DLE MKII is an excellent receiver for long distance nighttime AM signals. So is the Flex 6300 and Afedri dual channel, not the mention the wonderful Perseus and its recording abilities. With the Perseus, you can actually capture an hour of the entire AM broadcast band and play it back at your leisure.

But the ANAN and Afedri provide beamforming with a pair of loop or small vertical antennas. With this feature, you can actually resolve multiple stations on the same frequency.

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