Re: [IRCA] 30 years of skywave DXing

[John Callarman <johncallarman@xxxxxxx>]

Craig Healy wrote Imagine if Doc Brown in "Back To The Future" had brought me a Drake R8B and loop antenna in 1955. Or brought ME back to 1955. Imagine the DX with today's experience!

Yeah, or a Perseus, a good laptop, and a Wellbrook broadband loop.
 
Back in 1945, my father brought home a White's Radio Log from a road trip to Oklahoma. He talked about "fishing" on the radio, but I didn't really pick up on tuning our old Philco upright console for a couple of years or so. I was in Corvallis, Oregon, had knowledge of geography at 10 years old, and knew that picking up WHAM in Rochester was more impressive than hearing WGN in Chicago. By the time I got to the seventh grade, I started writing down the stations I heard, and also mapping out a nightly schedule of programs I wanted to hear. Much of radio was 29-minute network shows NBC, CBS, ABC and Mutual, with local commercial and ID breaks on the hour and the half hour. You could listen to your favorite programs, then DX for a couple of minutes at the top and bottom of the hour.
I remember one night on 1600 I was listening to an ABC show on KASH in Eugene, with a slight echo ... and at the station break there was just enough audio from the background station that I could hear its ID along with KASH's -- Montgomery, AL!
Three of my fellow 7th graders and I decided we would keep notes on all the stations we could hear, and that was when we invented DX'ing. I waited until I got my own table model radio ... I remember Mom went to Wards and came home with two Wards Airline radios ... one of them $10 more expensive than the other ($29.95 to $39.95) and the latter had a shortwave band also. Mom told me that if I chose the more expensive radio, I'd have to share it with her in the kitchen. I opted for the BCB only unit, which had one of those wire loop antennas plus a connection for an outside antenna. 
I started my first log on Oct. 27, 1947, but all I did was list the stations I heard ... call letters, frequency and city. White's didn't list Mexican stations, so when I heard them ... it sounded like the call letters were XCG, XCMO, etc., so that's what went into my log. The four of us, Wayne, John, Mac and Robert, had one target station, the New Orleans station on 990 ... which at that time was a 250-watt daytimer ... it was our target station because it was the only one that contained our initials, WJMR. We never heard it ... though we did hear, at sunset, daytimers as far east as Oklahoma. With that little Wards table model, I did hear Cuba on 830, the old Radio Salas, back when Cuban stations were privately owned, commercial operations, with no sign of WCCO ... and I remember the watery quality of the signal ... it was years before I realized that I had experienced Aurora. I also was able to identify a New Zealander on 650. By 1947, I had both a White's log and a Steve!
 nson's log to help identify what I was hearing. I remember my first equipment test ... it was KDDD, America's Ding Dong Daddy Station, in Dumas Texas on 800.
I wasn't aware of DX'ing as an organized hobby until 1950 when I found Radio and Television News, with Ken Boord's International Short Wave column, and I learned about QSL'ing, but I thought it only applied to SWBC. I couldn't imagine AM broadcasters sending out QSL cards. I turned to shortwave as my prime effort, though I do recall that I bought my first subscription to Broadcasting Magazine in 1950 ... 1735 DeSalles Street, Washington 25, D.C., I remember correctly ... and I bought my first WRH (later WRTH) from Ben Wilbur, 32 Whittlesey Ave., East Orange N.J. ... I didn't discover radio clubs, though, until 1955, when I joined NNRC and URDXC ... In 1950, a subscription to Broadcasting cost $7.00, and it included the Yearbook! My shortwave work started on a newer console the parents had bought, but it just covered the 25 and 19 meter bands. So I was able to wheedle my first communications rig, a Hallicrafters S38A.
In 1955, I started my first radio job at KCOV-1240 in Corvallis (I had done sports statistics, before then, for KRUL's high school sportscasts), and when Roy H. Millar in Issaquah, Wash., sent a taped report of a KCOV sign-off in early 1956, the station owner turned it over to me to reply ... Roy told me about NRC, I joined, did a DX test with two detailed reports from New Zealand plus as far east as Oklahoma City ... and I was on my way.
It's interesting, I suppose, that I was first on the air at KRUL in 1952 and here I am, 59 years later, living in KRUM, TX.
     
John Callarman, KA9SPA, Family Genealogist, Retired Newspaper Editor, DX-oyente, Krum TX (AKA Qal R. Mann, Krumudgeon)

 
> 
> Craig Healy
> Providence, RI
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