AM radio back in the day.

[dlbleak]

@Gadsden, found some on fleabay

 

[Gadsden]

@Gadsden, found some on fleabay

Cool. I'll be waiting to see some videos of what ya do with it

 

[n423]

I remember living in Moore in the '80's. We got KOMA radio over the phone line, when you picked up the receiver. Wasn't real loud.

 

[Jason Freeland]

Anyone remember building the transistor radio kit from radio shack or Tandy?

Heathkit made the best. I built one of their communication laser kits in high school. It was a 1mW Helium Neon modulatable job that you could beam whatever audio you wanted to the receiver. Pretty cool for a 15 year old to play with, in the 80s.

 

[dennishoddy]

Yep, I used to put one under my pillow so I could listen to the radio without my parents knowing.

That’s exactly what I did.

 

[TerryMiller]

I remember living in Moore in the '80's. We got KOMA radio over the phone line, when you picked up the receiver. Wasn't real loud.

I was visiting a family in Moore back in the mid-'60's and while there asked where their bathroom was. Once I got in there, the electric bathroom heater was picking up KOMA.

I grew up in Cimarron County, way out at the end of the Panhandle. We could only get KOMA after around 6:00 pm or so. Imagine my surprise when in 1962, our family took a trip to visit the World's Fair in Seattle and picked up KOMA way up there at night.

 

[SoonerP226]

I remember living in Moore in the '80's. We got KOMA radio over the phone line, when you picked up the receiver. Wasn't real loud.

I used to know a guy who grew up in Moore who said their fridge picked up KOMA. He said you could hear it loud and clear when you opened the door.

 

[SoonerP226]

Pretty interesting. I can remember hearing it loud and clear in the 70's day or night in Bartlesville.

View attachment 418240

I listened to KOMA in my teens and into my college years, and I remember hearing people call in from Canada and Mexico, talking about listening to them.

I also remember in '87 or so when they had a top 100 countdown over Memorial Day weekend. I had to drive up to a record store in south OKC (Rainbow Records, maybe?) to get the "official" countdown sheet that had all of the songs except for the ones in the tens positions and the top ten.

I rode with my folks up to the annual family reunion at Lake Keystone that weekend while KOMA was finishing the countdown, trying to listen to the end of the countdown on my boombox. I was seriously wondering how those folks in Canada were able to listen when I couldn't even pick it up in Pawnee County...

 

[Fr Mulcahy]

Tropospheric ducting. Broadcast FM is VHF, and it can happen occasionally. Us ham radio operators love it.

Radio signals are very odd. Especially AM the way it can bounce off the ionosphere. I grew up in Denver, and KOA was a clear channel station that ruled the night there (and elsewhere).

Incidentally, I used to run an FM station in Tulsa, which at the time was a small 3K watts, but it was the only tower in Tulsa proper. We received a postcard from a DX'er (a long distance-listener that scans the dial looking for the furthest signal they can pull in) in Maine once who identified what we were playing one night about 11:45pm until we signed-off at midnight. We couldn't cover all of the Metro, be we managed to get to Maine that night. FM is usually a line-of-sight type of signal, but something must have been just right that night. When I wrote him back verifying that the info was correct (they always want a response sent back on letterhead), I neglected to ask what his receiving gear was. Probably wasn't the little transistor radio that I used to sneak into Elementary school to listen to the World Series.

 

[davek]

I used to enjoy driving at night, windows down, scanning AM radio. KOA in Denver was another station you could get all over.