Interesting read. Thanks.
I didn’t listen to shortwave very much, though we did have a shortwave radio.
But, I did listen to AM radio at night a lot when I was younger. I was fascinated by the fact that when the sun went down, you could receive AM stations from distant cities.
I grew up in the Washington, DC, area. I recall at night listening to far away stations, such as WBZ in Boston, WOWO in Ft. Wayne, Indiana, and WBT in Charlotte, North Carolina.
And being a big baseball fan, I enjoyed tuning in distant stations to listen to the baseball games. I recall hearing Reds games on WLW from Cincinnati, WJR in Detroit to hear Tigers games, WGN in Chicago for Cubs games, and KMOX in St. Louis for Cardinals games.
Before live video feeds on cable networks, satellites and so on, not to mention the internet, my “Breaking News” go to in the USA and Canada was AM radio back in the 1970’s.
I had a Sony receiver by the late 70’s with the rotating ferrite bar antenna on top meaning daytime reception of clear channel AM stations from Boston to Chicago, including Cincinnati and Louisville.
At night KFI from LA and a host of Mexican stations including several from Mexico City came in.
Plane crash in Chicago meant dialing up WBBM on AM radio etc. etc.
Yes, you can still get the far-off cities at night. But AM quality is really lousy, much more so than back in the day (I suppose because there are so many more stations). Even local stations during the day are hard to pick up.
I can't help but wonder how people managed to listen to their programs back during the Golden Age of Radio considering it was all AM and at dawn and dusk the local and distant stations interfered with each other. No wonder all the music moved to FM.
Way back, before Glenn Beck really lost it, he said he was the GM or PM of WPGC. Until he got fired for drinking.
My "best" LW/MW/SW radio is the Ten-Tec 320. Here's a review of the DRM-ready version.
The conversion to DRM is simple, but I haven't bothered.
What was the really nice thing were the 3rd party apps that would control the radio. Specifically, a db that could import the quarterly, but delayed by a month list of scheduled programming, then sort on say English, active, and click on the station.
Saved a lot of time running around to find the favorite stations as they changed frequencies with Earth's orbit.
I used t live in Detroit. I had just as much fun listening to faraway stations. WBZ was one that I remember. Late night cross country drives are also fun to spin the AM dial.
Detroit had an AM rock and roll station, CKLW. Actually it was Windsor, Ontario that was an absolute blowtorch with a reach of 20 or so states. Many major careers including Elton John and Bob Seger were launched thanks to that station. They were also responsible for integrating white and black audiences to the same music. Motown would never have been as strong as it was if not for CKLW.