Need a radio engineer?

Question

I live in a rural area in N. Cal. up by the Oregon border. I have 5 radios /a heavy

duty Am/Fm/shortwave/cb/ etc. and a

boom box with am/fm and a clock radio

and a head set.

On any of these radios at night from

8PM until 7AM, I can hear stations in

OR/Id/Ut/NV/L.A & SF. These fade out

totally at 7AM and I can only get one

Spanish station which is about 3 blocks

from me.

I love to listen to coast to coast am and various progressive stations at night.

How can I pull in the stations in the

daytime that I can get at night?

How can I receive ANY AM stations

during the day? Thanks. Here's another question below

Answer 1

Because both AM and shortwave bounce off the ionosphere, it only makes sense you get them at night so much better.  At the AM station where I do afternoon news & production, our transmitter has to go to low power at times set by the FCC each month--those change as the days get longer or shorter.   I doubt it would be possible for you to get some of those after sunrise.  But now that I think about it, you could always get an external antenna, sometimes called an AM loop or a loop antenna. That may help a bit, but I wouldn't call it a sure thing.

I bet you've also noticed that AM is god-awful on a cloudy day.  That's attenuation (a noticeable weakening of the signal) caused by the water vapor.

Answer 2

No guarantees on how well it will work at your location, but this is the combination I use for long distance (DX) AM reception:

GE Superradio:

http://www.ccrane.com/radios/am-fm-radio...

Select-A-Tenna:

http://www.ccrane.com/antennas/am-antenn...

During the day I am able to receive some of the stronger New York stations at my location over 200 miles away. At night-time I can receive stations from half way across the country.

But as the others have posted, there is nothing you can do to "fix" the disappearance of ionospheric propagation that occurs at dawn. No radio can do that. It's all in the physics.

Happy listening.

Answer 3

You don't need a radio engineer, they cost too much and will tell you to get a $5000 radio and about 200 feet of wire and still maybe lucky to get about a 1/4 of what you catch at night.

Danagasta had it somewhat correct. The Ionosphere changes at night. It's a layer of particles in the atmosphere that radio bounces off of. A layer that appears during the day basically 'traps" most radio signals from bouncing, but at night this layer goes away and allows for the distance stations you hear.

What she says is true in that many stations have to reduce or get off the air at night so these distant stations can come in.

But nope this is why where I live, I get stations only within about 50-75 miles during the day of me, but get stations from all over the south and midwest at night including Chicago,Cincinnati and Nashville