The radio on the AM dial is crackly as a storm approaches - sure brings back memories

[rurallib]

back to the days of my youth so many eons ago - the 1950s and '60s.

Seems like I always had a radio in my ear.

I had two older brothers and we all had transistors shortly after they became available. During the summer we would stay up all night listening to rock 'n' roll on the 50,000 watt powerhouses around the country. Mother didn't work outside the house, so we got to sleep as late as we wanted.

We also slept on a closed in porch so we were out of sight from the parents - it was like a summer long camping trip.

So when it got dark, we'd turn on the radios and listen to the Mighty 1090 out of Little Rock, KOMA in Oklahoma and our favorite WLS in Chicago.

AM radio was all we had back then - FM was a vast wasteland then. And it seemed like most every summer night had a goodly amount of snap, crackle and pop coming from the weather.

So as I was listening to the AM radio tonight and heard the crackle it brought back some fond memories.

[Warpy]

1. As soon as the sun went down, reception got better

and signals could be bounced around from all sorts of remarkable places. Even stations down south that were on all night would play old radio plays and the kind of music that gave Baptists the vapors, like stuff from Screamin' Jay Hawkins and old Bessie Smith double entendre stuff from the 20s and 30s. I was a late night radio junkie, up most of the night because I could never get to sleep until 3 or 4 AM, radio under my pillow to muffle the snap-crackle-pop that existed from March to December on faraway stations.

I remember WLS fondly. I remember WOWO not so fondly, those bastards drowned everybody out on a big chunk of the dial. I loved Jean Shepherd on WOR. I got a kick out of Garner Ted Armstrong getting me into heaven for $3.95 until it dawned on me it wasn't satire and enough fools took it seriously enough to keep him rich.

AM radio allowed me to listen in to just about everybody east of the Rockies. FM is very local and not much fun at all. It's really a pity AM went to right wing ranters. It was sure fun while it lasted, especially to a night owl kid with few other options.

[rurallib]

5. the local stations cut their power at sundown and the clear channels powered up at sundown

and it was like touring the country in your bed!

I can still name most of the clear channel stations, but most of them suck now. So I have gone to computer radio for fun. Now I get stations from all over the world!

One of my favorite shows didn't come until the 80s. It was a one hour show from Denver called "Hit and Get" that ran in the middle of the night ( 2 to 3AM Denver time on Saturday and Sunday morning). They ignored FCC rules and for 15 seconds a caller could say whatever they wanted. It was hi(high?)larious.

[LeftInTX]

2. WLS was "the" night time station up in Wisconsin

Most of the local stations went off the air. I used to get stations from further away, but they were all talk. When I moved to South Texas, I managed to get WLS on my clock radio. I listened to "Turn Turn Turn" at 5 am in the morning. That was the last time I listened to WLS. A few years later, we went back up north, but WLS had switched to talk radio.

[rurallib]

7. I can't remember some of the old jocks from that time

John "Records" Landecker seems to ring a bell.
The most famous was probably Dick Biondi, but I think he came later.

[cheapdate]

3. A crackling radio is a comforting sound,

never more so than when heard on a battery-powered radio while camping in the back-country.

[rurallib]

4. Ain't that the truth!

the link to civilization!

[marked50]

6. To add to the old memories

On those late nights I used a "crystal" radio. It was shaped like a small space ship that could fit in the palm of your hand and you had to tune it by pulling on a knob at its tip and moving a rod to get the right frequency hit. You had to attach it to a ground source with an attached clip but it required no batteries and it was before transistors ( I think). Loads of fun.

[rurallib]

8. heard of them but never tried one

looked like fun!

[Hokie]

9. I had one of those as a kid

It almost seemed like magic. They had no batteries. They worked by using the tiny amount of power received from the radio station itself. During the daytime you could hear maybe one or two local stations but at night if you were lucky you could receive a station from hundreds of miles away.

[marked50]

11. That's the one--Cool

For some facts about these devices.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_radio

[Hokie]

12. The ones from our childhood used a germanium diode not a crystal

The name crystal goes back to the early days of radio when they made a diode detector by touching a piece of galena crystal with a small wire called a cat's whisker. You had to move the wire around to find the exact spot for it to work. By the 1950's the cat's whisker had been replaced with a much more reliable germanium semiconductor diode.

[marked50]

13. So no longer a crystal but a "neophyte" transistor-thanks for the info---n/t

[Lochloosa]

10. I used to listen to a station out of Kansas

This was in the early 70's. Some guy would talk for a few minutes and then 20 to 30 minutes of music. Really strange music. Lol.

I'm was in Florida.

[msongs]

14. listened to KOMA in north dakota! their weather forecast high 70, ours? low -30 nt

[rurallib]

16. was that during the summer?

[Snarkoleptic]

15. As a pre-teen in the early '70's, I moved from a shared bedroom and into the (lookout) basement.

Flexing my newfound freedom, I'd stay up waaay past bedtime most every night to listen to talk on am560 WIND and music on am890 WLS "the big 89" on my clock radio.
Living in the NW suburbs of Chicago, I was always amazed when able to tune into some Texas based stations, which seemed world away.

During the summer, I was always thrilled to hear the WLS "Magic Bus" would be scheduled to drop by the Hoffman Estates community pool (on Grand Canyon Pkwy).
I'd hop the bus and spend the day at the pool hoping to meet someone other than a WLS intern, but usually just came away with a t-shirt or frisbee.

During high school, my drivers ed 'behind the wheel' frequently involved a trip to the doughnut shop and the we'd always have the radio tuned to WLS to hear 'Animal Stories' with Larry Lujack and Lil' Tommy. My fave radio personality was Steve Dahl (of Disco Demolition fame/infamy), who has since returned to WLS and is on from 3-7CST. The rest of the station is crap and features Limbaugh and other such rubbish, which Dahl frequently mocks. His current sidekick is Dag Juhlin, who is a guitarist for Poi Dog Pondering.

Steve also has a podcast-
http://dahl.com/

[steve2470]

17. When I was 14 (1972) I became a hardcore AM DXer.....

DXer = nerd like me who actively listened for super distant AM stations despite horrible reception

I was in Orlando, and I got stations like you said, WLS and WWL and WBT and .... the list goes on. I got a station from Colorado one time and I was in ecstasy! I got Cuba and Mexico too. I never got Canada. I got Boston pretty regularly.

I've done FM DXing too. Never tried TV DXing. Good times and really great shows at times! Oh, never tried shortwave DXing either although people say it's really fascinating.

[Yonnie3]

18. A decade earlier ...

I was doing the AM DXing in Virginia. On a winter's evening, I would sit on a graveyard channel (one with no powerhouse stations) and listen as various stations signed off or went to low power and others came fading in. As the night went on the stations were further and further away. I used a 1949 Ford car radio that I had painstakingly tweaked for selectivity and converted to run off AC power. I also sought the off frequency Mexican and Caribbean stations who were not on an even frequency. You could find them because there was a whine other the the 10,000 cps normal between the US stations.

It seemed almost magic to me, a 14 year old pimply faced geek.

[steve2470]

19. it was like magic! nt

[rurallib]

20. didn't know there was a name for it

from Iowa we would get a span from Denver to Boston and from the occasional Cuba or Mexico to I think Montreal (I could understand a little Spanish, but no French. We could easily get Toronto.

At night during the summer in the old analog TV days the signal would really bounce on clear nights with high pressure systems. We got Seattle several times, Louisville, Chicago, New York and for one brief fleeting bit Los Angeles. Doing the TV stuff was for Saturday nights - it was so fun.

[steve2470]

21. check out these links

http://www.dxing.com/amband.htm

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DXing

[Yonnie3]

22. Some more names ...

I learned some of the science of radio propagation.

Tropospheric Ducting: typically happening when there is a temperature inversion, signals may be propagated much longer than normal distances. This might be the mode you saw when the high pressure came through.

Sporadic E: Where an area in the ionosphere above the earth becomes highly charged and reflects distant signals. In most sporadic E modes the signal is very strong. I was riding in my pickup in Virginia and was listening to a local FM station when a mid-west station overrode the local.

These modes still happen to the over the air digital TV signals, but the TV can't handle it. When the TV reception suddenly sucks I do a channel scan and may see dozens of distant signals for an hour or two.

[Hokie]

23. Any Jean Shepherd fans here?

Shepherd was on WOR 710 AM out of NYC for years every weekday night from 10:15 until 11:00 PM. Shep was an amateur radio operator from the time he was a teenager. He often mentioned crystal radios and would give a shout out to anyone listening to him on a crystal radio. I still have some of his shows that I recorded on reel to reel magnetic tapes from the early 70's. Yes, in summer it was a chore to listen through static crashes and fading.

[doc03]

24. I remember late night listening to WCFL from Chicago and WBZ from Boston, they would fade

in and out and in the summer there was always the crackling of lightning. That was the only place we could get good music the local
stations all played preachers at night.