Commercial AM Stations on the ADF

Ron Levy said:
Back in the late 70's, we used to use the "50,000 watt clear channel voice of WHAS, Louisville," to find our way straight home. Some nights it would work from 400 miles out.
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A friend of mine picked up 770 KKOB on his ADF (an Albuquerque news radio station) all the way out in Needles, CA one night.
 
There were nights I used to pick up KMOX out of St Louis, 1100 IIRC, over 1000 miles away.
 
cessna182b said:
I agree. I have a directory of AM (and other) stations that was published just for that purpose. It is old, and you probably can't get them anymore. I'd give you the name, but am away from home and don't have it with me. It's something like "Captain Mike's Radio Station Directory"

Dave
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Found the publication I was referring to - It's called the Captains Guide, and has a listing of AM Stations (and much more): http://www.airchart.com/products.asp?cat=4
I have an old one somewhere.

As for clear channel stations, this one was a real humdinger:http://hawkins.pair.com/wlw.shtml

Half a million watts until the government made them cut the power back to 50KW.

As for personal experience, I remember flying across North Dakota in pre-GPS days, and being out of range of all VORs. Not so the NDB in Bismarck, which worked like a charm. Another time I was flying across Iowa under a cieling and one VOR along the route was OTS. The 'ol ADF came in handy on that occasion as well.

Dave
 
If you dig into AM radio history a bit, when the FCC limited the power of the U.S. stations they all moved just across the border into Mexico for a while. Great history.
 
denverpilot said:
If you dig into AM radio history a bit, when the FCC limited the power of the U.S. stations they all moved just across the border into Mexico for a while. Great history.
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I know of the two big ones but didn't know there were any more. Can you cite some of the references? I must have missed them.
 
jnmeade said:
I know of the two big ones but didn't know there were any more. Can you cite some of the references? I must have missed them.
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I dug around on the Internet a few years ago.

Search terms like "Mexican AM stations" should lead to a number of time-wasting articles. ;)

I was researching the legality of Low Power FM and an announcement back then that FCC was going to allow more of them.

They really didn't, they just didn't want to get into embarrassing "church vs state" style lawsuits with mega-Churches who do it, flying under the licensing radar.

I got sidetracked into Pirate radio history.
 
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