KNBR (AM 680) Antennas, Redwood City, CA, 2024
All the pixels, less risk of electrocution or falling, at https://www.flickr.com/photos/mattblaze/54131419266
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this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2025
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The rapid decline of local content on the mediumwave bands has considerably reduced the romantic mystery of tuning around and seeing what you find. It's mostly now a sterile mix of mass-produced, syndicated right wing talk, sports, and so on. But there are still a handful of stubbornly local stations producing their own programming.
@mattblaze@federate.social agreed, and many of those unique, local broadcasters are operating at relatively low power levels, while the QRM from poorly shielded switching electronics gets louder every day.
kind of feels like MW AM isn't the only communication medium suffering this kind of SNR degradation lately.
@mattblaze@federate.social The graveyard still produce a glorious at night...and this past winter I spent some time Sunset Skipping...and can still hear some local daytime stations in Virginina/Tennesee/North Carolina playing country gospel with local small business ads from my QTH in Brooklyn...but not like it used to be.
@pirateradiomap@toot.community I can regularly (in summer, overnight) receive identifiable stations on all but 11 of the MW slots. A few gems in there, but also a lot of monotony. And yes, the local ads are often the best part!
@mattblaze "produce a glorious mush" that is
@mattblaze Also I miss the clear channel (the band allocation, not the company) overnight Trucker shows. The Road Gang from WWL New Orleans was my favorite.
@pirateradiomap and WWVA’s overnight trucking show.
@mattblaze@federate.social
With Big John Trimble! My favorite though was Big John Parker, the weekend guy on the Road Gang...he was what I like call to a "cornball nihilist" He'd come up with these crazy pranks for the truckers to do...like look for the missing hour during the change back to standard time. And he would record the truckers who would call in and then he'd edit the tape to make them say weird things.
@mattblaze And he was a collector of vintage country music on Sunday mornings between 4-6 AM he had a specialty show called "Country Music the Way It Used to Was." I"d stay up all night to tape it and would switch over the WRVA to catch The Silver Star Quartet an old school Black Gospel harmony group doing request sfor people who were getting up for church. Caught a few of those on tape.
@mattblaze
I've probably got about 100 hours worth of the Road Gang on cassette...a digitization project I should get to post haste given I recorded them in the mid-late 80s.
@pirateradiomap Oh, that definitely needs to b e online!
@mattblaze@federate.social Yeah! I've got some digitizied...I'll try to put them up soon.
@mattblaze@federate.social I used to enjoy listening to radio stations from over a thousand miles away when I was a kid. They still played music on AM back then.