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- Subject: Re: [IRCA] Oregon Cliff Booby Prize
- From: Stephen Airy <pianoplayer88key@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 7 May 2014 06:21:24 -0700 (PDT)
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Haha nice one, Gary :)
Reminds me of a few times I've been fooled on my DSP portables. :)
For one, several times I thought I could hear weak talking on 1560 in the daytime, with the aid of the SAT. I thought for a while I had KNZR from Bakersfield here in the east county San Diego area! Turns out, though, that it was a spur transmitted by 1700 XEPE!
Another one was hearing threshold-level music on 660, making me think I had KTNN in the daytime, at a distance of nearly 500 miles. Lo and behold, it was yet another spur from a Mexican, with 540 XESURF being the guilty party.
On my local Family Radio affiliate 910 KECR, I heard another talk station under it in the daytime. I was wondering what on earth am I hearing midday on 910? San Francisco and Phoenix shouldn't be making it here. Turns out it's 1170 KCBQ, which shares the same transmitter site.
Also, I was doing some experimenting once, inductively coupling to the utility groundwire out front with the SAT tuned to my strongest local station, 760 KFMB, at night. Of course it was overloading severely, with 760 reading 98/25 and having just brief blips of audio, nothing intelligible, and 1520 in the upper 70s / low 80s or so. I tuned to 750 and heard music. At first I thought I had KHWG from Fallon, NV, and was temporarily excited about the "halfway decent selectivity". Unfortunately, it turned out to be an image from the aforementioned 910 KECR.
Also, my DSP portables' internally-generated squeals, hets, etc, have fooled me a few times too. I heard one on 1107 mixing with 1110 KDIS, thinking I had a TA around sunset one late afternoon. When I checked at a different time of day, though, when TA/TP signals should not reach here, I still heard the het, revealing it was internally generated. :( What do you do when DXing barefoot to step around those internal hets that happen to be on the same frequency as TP/TA targets?
73, Stephen
On Thursday, May 1, 2014 1:32 AM, Gary DeBock via IRCA <irca@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Hello All,
Sometimes DXing failures are so funny that they are almost as memorable as DXing successes.
Three weeks ago on the "Rockwork 4" ocean side cliff I had decided to seek elusive South Pacific DX by setting up at the highly exposed Highway 101 location at 0800 UTC (0100 local time), in the face of a freezing overnight wind chill. I was convinced that such a bizarre strategy was the key to more DU loggings, and was prepared to pay the price in stiff fingers, toes and other appendages.
It seemed like the strategy would pay immediate dividends on the very first frequency (531 kHz), as not only the New Zealand 5 kW Samoan language station 531-PI was received around 0836 UTC with female voice conversation (for the second time during the DXpedition), but also an apparent exotic co-channel along with it http://www.mediafire.com/listen/3iy924gcvacw1yi/531-PI-0836z041114SWP.MP3
DU co-channels with 531-PI are almost always the eastern Australian 5 kW stations, but no Aussie stations had shown up with any strength during the entire DXpedition. Besides, this co-channel had very heavily accented English-- unlike anything that had previously shown up on 531. Maybe the elusive 531-More FM in Alexandra? Its strength was weak, so it took quite a while staying on the frequency (fighting the punishing wind chill the whole time) until 531-PI slowly faded down enough to make sense of the co-channel's speech http://www.mediafire.com/listen/6xcni9k3t8avrsa/530-UnID-TIS-0838z041114SWP.MP3
After hearing this bizarre English weather report multiple times I knew that I had been duped-- this wasn't an exotic DU at all, but some local Oregon TIS station on 530 kHz-- using a heavily accented announcer just to throw off an overly optimistic DU DXer fighting a severe wind chill at 0138 local time on a highly exposed Oregon ocean side cliff! Tuning the frequency down to 530 kHz (at 36 seconds into the MP3 recording, above) confirmed the fiasco.
It wasn't very funny at the time, but now it seems pretty hilarious.
73 and Good DX,
Gary DeBock (in Puyallup, WA, USA)
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