Trying to Pull in 1090 AM on my Sangean DT-400: Forget It

I walked the girls this morning. I had my Sangean DT-400. Tuned to 1090 for Jim Rome. A splatter of hiss and crackle. Forget it. 

The Sangean WR-2 is tolerable with hiss through the speaker but intolerable through the earbuds. 

So far I'm having my best reception with the CCrane SW. 

Related articles

First Attempt at Setting Date and Day of the Week Failed on the Sangean WR-5

Best Analog Table Radio for Your Money: Sangean WR-11

Comments

[brandon]

Have you considered something like a Tecsun PL-390? Based on reviews here and elsewhere it looks like its the best of breed of the mini Tecsuns, and Amazon right now has it pretty cheap for $55 shipped (you'll play $70 on ebay for one in the US). It has selectable bandwidths of 1, 2, 3, 4, and 6khz, the lower of which may help your reception.

[Drive-In-Freak]

I'm surprised this is the case. I realize that there's KNX 1070 right down the dial, and it's 50KW, but XEPRS is also a 50KW blowtorch, and you're in it's coverage aria...
http://www.radio-locator.com/cgi-bin/pat?call=XEPRS&service=AM&status=F&hours=D
...even at night...
http://www.radio-locator.com/cgi-bin/pat?call=XEPRS&service=AM&status=F&hours=N

The legendary Wolfman Jack used to run spots aimed at the LA market on his show when he was on that station.

[Geezer]

Time to break out the Panasonic RF-2200!

[Drive-In-Freak]

Agreed on the RF-2200 or even better in the case a Sony ICF2010.

Ohhhhh. Now I see. KNX is running IBOC. I should read more down the page before I post. 8/

Why broadcasters are allowed to trash up the band with a system that's even less popular than the old practically unknown cQuam AM Stereo is beyond me.
Not only is it pointless because nobody has a radio that'll receive IBOC, but the system that everyone couldn't care less about wanting to to tune in to is destructive. It eats up 3X the bandwidth of a standard AM signal, restricts analog audio down to 5KHz, and causes a great deal of interference.

What are and were they thinking? Didn't they learn anything at all from the fiasco that was AM Stereo back in the '80s?

[brandon]

KNX is on 1070 - does IBOC destroy reception 2 adjacents away? I always thought it only trashes the immediate adjacent channels.

[Drive-In-Freak]

Yes, it can and often does. It's not supposed to be that way I don't think, but I get hash from a station running IBOC on 620 all the way down to 604 and up to 636 on a Sony ICF2010 set on narrow, and that station is about 40 miles from me as the crow flies.
Within 5 or 10 miles of the towers it would probably take a brick wall 3KHz filter to kill the sound of the hash on 600 and 640.

[Mark Roberts]

When KTCT (1050, San Mateo) was broadcasting IBOC, it was difficult to pick up KNX on skywave at night. (Jeff will wish to note the irony.) Even when you could get it, there would be a high noise floor underneath.

Not the only thing that will kill radio, it seems (FM IBOC has similar issues). Phil Hendrie thinks poor management is a part of it, too: http://swflorida.blogspot.com/2013/01/phil-hendrie-rants-about-radios-low-pay.html

[Drive-In-Freak]

Ah,,, good ol' Phil Hendrie. I remember him form back in the Neil Rogers days om WIOD. He has a good pint, but I think that broadcast radio has been dead for years.

Where I live I can hear the same exact thing on no less than three stations on the AM dial all of them strong enough to qualify as local. One of them is a 50,000 blowtorch that covers not only here but very clearly in the market with the other station. In it's "local" coverage aria there are no less than eight stations airing the same thing.
Tune into late night radio and you'll hear the same exact thing on almost every other spot on the dial.
The other stations? I don't understand Spanish and who in their right mind wants to hear seemingly endless statistics about the games other people play? Oh, please tell me more than anyone should know about how many times some schmuck that makes 15,000,00 a year adjusts his jockstrap for hours in end.

FM? It's gotten so bad that the AM stations are starting to simulcast on it. Want music? Well if your idea of entertainment is listening to the same fifty or even less records over, and over, and over,and over, and over, and over again is entertainment more power to ya, but in this day and age when you can carry literally 100X the selections in your pocket why bother?

[Mark Roberts]

Those trends really had been building for years. It was just that there used to be room for slightly oddball stations doing interesting things. Most of those seem to be gone now as the publicly traded chains have bought up everything in sight, overextending themselves in the process, and are applying standard corporate cost-reduction techniques to compensate. Nice bonus: I'm sure the annual Christmas-season layoffs at Clear Channel and CBS will really entice talented people to enter the business.

Indeed, "but in this day and age when you can carry literally 100X the selections in your pocket why bother?" I've stated it a little differently: why listen to someone else's automated jukebox when you can listen to your own?

It makes the little hobby of collecting radio receivers even more absurd. I'm not much on nostalgia but maybe this is a thinly disguised form of it, or maybe I'm just compensating for the years when better radios really would have expanded the world that I had access to.

What keeps me interested, at least a little bit, are the small college stations, the occasional small-town AM station that's still local, the scattered ethnic programming, and NPR. Occasionally there is a commercial station that I can still listen to. In San Francisco Cumulus ruined KFOG in 2012, but Entercom's "K-FOX" also grabbed some good people from that debacle, let them be themselves on the air, and opened up the playlists a little bit. So occasionally there is hope. Computerized and cramped playlists, right-wing verbal vomit, and vacuous sports talk have ruined the rest.

[twitter.com/karldotcom]

CBS Sports Radio and Jim Rome have been added to the Jack 93.1 HD 2 feed in Los Angeles as of Wednesday.

http://radiodiscussions.com/smf/index.php?topic=226757.0