What got you the DX bug?

I'm sure all of us have gotten the DX bug at some time or another which has caused you to become a radio/TV DXer.

For me, I was five-six years old (1997-1998). I just got a Walkman so I could listen to the local stations in Charleston. I was listening to AM and FM stations in our area. I went to AM to listen to 1250 WTMA (one of our main locals at the time), and didn't know much else (1340 AM was the sports station at the time, 1450 AM was a news/talk station that my dad listened to with Oliver North in afternoons).

The first DX I can remember was driving from Myrtle Beach to Charleston, listening to a New York Giants football game on WFAN in New York. That was my first memory of DXing. My first DX catch on the Walkman on AM was WPHT 1210 Philadelphia with Harry Kalas doing a Phillies game. My first FM catch I remember was WKQL 96.9 Jacksonville over my local 96.9.

What got you the DX bug?

I was always interested in listening to the radio as far back as I can remember. About the time I was 6 years old our family took an overnight train trip. While everyone else was eating dinner and doing other things, the conductor was nice enough to give me a radio and hook up one of those rubber antennas to the window so I could listen as we traveled. A few years later a friend of mine got a shortwave radio. Soon after I got one--a Zenith Trans Oceanic. Although I enjoyed shortwave, I soon noticed that the AM receiver on it was very good and by turning the radio I could get stations from various parts of the country plus Canada & Mexico. I even took that radio on family trips and soon noticed I could pick up the big 50KW Chicago stations (my hometown) almost anywhere we traveled in the US & Canada.
A new hobby began and I've never given it up.

Look no further than the picture to your left. That's the same model Zenith as the one my grandparents bought new in 1937 or 1938. AM and three shortwave bands. Fast forward twenty-plus years, and I was about twelve years old, and my grandparents were living with us. I started playing around with it. Soon it became a daily...or nightly....part of my life. And the rest, as they say, is history. I still have the radio in my garage (not working, but if tubes can be found, it probably could be brought back to life rather easily).

I started as a shortwave listener when I was around 7, fiddling with the big '40s console radio in my grandparents living room. One of the first things I recall hearing was AFRTS and the Indianapolis 500. Then came the BBC, Radio Moscow, the Voice of America, Radio Nederland and all the foreign-language stations -- many of which I could hear signing on and off with the familiar "Yankee Doodle" of the Voice of America, while others remained a mystery. This was the mid-'60s, so I also came across hams chatting about weather, fishing, antennas and work in AM mode on 40 and 75 meters. With each visit, I got better at digging out signals, picking the Windward Islands Broadcasting Service and ELWA Liberia out of the pile. I was hooked and it wasn't long before a teenage neighbor gave me a vintage tabletop receiver with an AM band and one SW band -- 4 to 12 MHz. A few birthdays later, I got a real receiver -- a suitcase-like Zenith Transoceanic, and my listening really took off, expanding to MW DXing, albeit with only the internal antenna, and the bustling 2 MHz marine band, a fun listen from my coastal Massachusetts QTH. By the time I reached high school, my shack had a Hammarlund HQ-180, on which I listened to both ham and SWBC. Medium wave DX wasn't really of interest other than to keep up with baseball and hockey.

I remained an avid listener for many years, only slacking off over the past couple of decades with the decline of SW broadcasting, although I still enjoy eavesdropping on the hams from time to time.

I grew up on Long Island and have always been a radio freak listening to everything on the AM dial in the late 50s and early 60s. One night I discovered WBAL and I was hooked. CKLW,WOWO and WKBW became regular catches and I became a fan of those stations. Despite WNBC,WOR,WABC,WCBS and WINS so close by, I discovered WMAQ,WGN,WBBM,WLS and WCFL and they would come in and began listening to them,as well, I even put up a US map on my wall and stuck pins at cities I received signals from. Back in those days I picked up WOAI,KSL and KOA. My DXing hobby is still with me 50 plus years later and I will scan the AM dial at night to see what I can pick up. To this day,wherever I go a radio is still my constant companion..

Simple. Bad local stations. Either heavily censored top-40 or country. Neither of which appealed to me. I am not the only DX'er to come out of Midland. Virtually all kids in their teens DX'd KOMA Oklahoma City or WLS Chicago at night. It was about the music. It still is. I don't have a single QSL card nor do I want any. I want my music, my way, uncensored. It is getting harder and harder to find over the air.

Interesting approach and hobby introduction for you and the crew, RBruce. Mine was sort of similar, yet led to an on-air radio career.

My Folks had one of those Zenith AM-Phono consoles on the enclosed front porch. You'd open the handle to the door under the radio knobs and this turntable would roll out at you. All of the front porches in the postal zone, down near what was then Idlewild Airport were enclosed. The architecture was like a slightly-suburban Archie Bunker home.
Well, my buddy's Dad owned and ran a TV-repair shop in south Queens NYC. One night my buddy came by to hang out .... spotted the Zenith .... and with his electronics curiosity, had no option but ask to try it out.

The first time I'd ever heard the Zenith fired up was when my Mom would have it on. Dad moonlighted a few nights (just like the TV Archie Bunker did -- at a tavern) and Mom would get tired of the TV and turn on the radio. The station she enjoyed was WNBC, and the DJ was Bob Haymes with his 'Melody In The Night' show ..... Four Freshman, Rosie Clooney, et al. So upon hearing Bob Haymes, the brother of the singer Dick Haymes, btw, I instantly wanted to be a disc jockey. At age 12 or 13.

When my pal Vinny and I decided to try out that 'antique' Zenith that night, well ..... Holy Smoke. Wide-eyed and wide-eared, we were getting Boston on it (WBZ), and * BALTIMORE * -- WBAL.
And then there was this nut on WPOP 1410 in Hartford -- Joey Reynolds.
Now, I wanted to be a disc jockey more than ever before. WPOP was playing the same pop songs as our local WABC, and the same tunes as the local I-always-found-hokey WMCA.

Well, I'm still quite uncured, having spent 26 years in radio and recently having approached being 'clean' after many sessions at DXers Anonymous meetings.

But I'll never forget that Zenith on the porch. It was around 1967 when I logged my 1000th AM station on the darned thing -- KWWL 1330 from Iowa. Something about the sound of it all, both the sonics and the new pop music, plus the distances, and me wondering what places like Buffalo and Scranton and Richmond and Albany really were like, got me addicted at a young age.

Great post, Charleston!

In my area if SE Michigan, the local Top 40 and R & B stations were GROUNDBREAKING. New artists and comeback artists often had their singles and tracks hit the Top 10 more than THREE MONTHS ahead of appearing on the Top 10 at WLS and WCFL. Many tracks debuted nationally on WTAC and WTRX, and you can see and track that on ARSA, oldiesloon, and other similar sites today. And not just Motown and what's known today as Northern Soul in the UK, but Van Morrison, Moby Grape, Bob Seger, and even the Cryan' Shames often had tracks that debuted on one or more of the local stations. But they were Class IIIs with DAs, and suburban areas often got weak signals at night with a lot of cochannel interference, so people there listened to WLS, WCFL, WOWO, WLAC and other stations at Night. In nearby college towns, stations were Class IVs (WJIM), had restrictive DAs (WILS), Daytime only (WVIC, WPAG), and the Detroit area stations also had DAs that made the signals disappear or nearly disappear at Night, including CKLW The Big 8 and WKNR Keener 13. So a lot of college students and other people DXed for Top 40 at Night, until FM started to take over.

I started DXing when I was very young. First, it was stations just outside the local area, that were listed in the Newspaper, then it was WGN at Night, and even during the Day on the Delco car radio. It expanded soon to WLS, WCFL, WBZ, WOWO, WABC and many others. Some Class IIIs like WING and WAKR were skywaves also frequently heard. I listened to WCFL even in the Daytime with my outside antenna. But not because I didn't like the local stations, but in addition to them. In fact, many well known air personalities, including Casey Kasem, John Landecker, and Bob DelGiorno, worked at my local stations early in their careers.

Since there seems to be a "common denominator" of distant stations that helped trigger an interest in DX, I'll chirp in here with mine.... WBZ.

Playing around with the nearly 25-year old Zenith console, I suddenly found myself listening to top 40 from Boston and WBZ. Not long after that KTHS became KAAY, thus creating a new top 40 powerhouse in the middle part of the dial to go with WLS and WOKY....and newly-discovered WBZ.

Since there seems to be a "common denominator" of distant stations that helped trigger an interest in DX, I'll chirp in here with mine.... WBZ.

Playing around with the nearly 25-year old Zenith console, I suddenly found myself listening to top 40 from Boston and WBZ. Not long after that KTHS became KAAY. Thus creating another top 40 powerhouse in the middle part of the dial to go with WLS and WOKY....and newly-discovered WBZ.

....Oh yeah!

This is a great thread! I guess my story is not that different from a lot of people here, but I'll share it anyway.

I was kind of an unusual kid, fascinated at an early age by maps and radio. I learned early on, maybe when I was 6 or 7, that I could catch AM radio stations from what I considered faraway places like Cincinnati, Atlanta and Denver. That's not real DX, if you're hearing WLW, WSB and KOA at night from your midwestern home, but it fascinated me.

My dad worked for an ad agency, and I got second-hand copies of Standard Radio Rates and Data books from one of his colleagues. These were books that were used by ad buyers, and listed many frequencies and power info for AM and FM stations in addition to their spot ad rates. I poured over those things, learning about stations all over the US, and then noticing that I could catch many stations that weren't necessarily predictable catches (i.e., clear channels at night from cities around the south and midwest.) I learned about different levels of power and directional/non-directional patterns, etc. Gradually, I started making a game out of finding stations I hadn't heard before. For example, I remember picking up 1390 from Hobbs, NM, a 5,000 watt station that you wouldn't expect to hear anytime in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. From around that time, when I was maybe 10 or 11 years old, I think I became a DX-er.

I'd say it was a mix of fascination with radio, maps, traveling, and a curiosity about faraway places. Also, I liked hearing stuff on the radio that I didn't hear on local stations, like talk radio and progressive rock and eventually....wow! Stations from Mexico, Cuba and even exotic Canada.

DavidEduardo said:

KOMA in Midland at night is not DX. You were well within the predictable and protected coverage area of that station, and the station sold advertising that included places like Raton, NM, Lamar, CO, Jamestown, ND and similar locations even farther away than Midland.

And WLS, like all 1-A clear channels, was protected in that era from interference in the whole continental US. While today the WLS protection extends only about to Miami, OK, back then before the break of the clears, you were in the WLS protected zone (see the famous KOB vs. WABC case on how WABC expected protection all the way to NE New Mexico.

Neither of those stations is any more "DX" than getting WBAP in Denton.

Click to expand...

Interesting you brought up the WABC / KOB situation. While KOMA and WLS might have been reasonably expected in Midland at night, the average high school kid didn't care where the station came from, only that it was reliable. Of course there was the backlash factor against KCRS - I think the song Ohio by CSM brought the issue to a head. There was a lot of talk around the high school about the need for a better local station - but high school kids had neither the funds nor the skill set to make it happen. There was a lot of experimentation, we would hear about how KSEL Lubbock played better music, I added KLIF Dallas to the discussion, somebody else noticed that even graveyarder KLBK could be coaxed out in Midland during the day. None of the stations, however, played everything we wanted.

Back to KOB / WABC - a trip to Houston one time and my cousins were taunting me by calling me "cousin Brucie" - I hadn't a clue where they got it, until they pulled out a little portable at night, turned it a certain way, and there was WABC! I asked them how in the world they found out about it - and they said kids at their high school told them about it. Apparently a lot of kids were starting to listen, because Gordon McLendon censored his stations as much as the Schbauer family did KCRS in Midland. I have no idea how many Houston kids were listening to WABC, or who first discovered it - but that is big time DX'ing because of the distance, and having to null KOB. The resulting signal was really good - that portable was nothing special, I ended up with it a few years ago - your standard "all japanese 6" in a larger case with a little bigger ferrite bar and speaker.

Again - it was just the music - or lack of it locally that spurred the habit of listening for distant signals. I do know I created quite a stir with my discovery that was possible to get reliable reception of Dallas FM, although my initial discovery was of KTFM San Antonio. I was just processing another tape of them the other day - an album feature at midnight. A couple of deep fades during minor songs on the album, but impressive for over 300 miles. After a few weeks, I turned the antenna towards Dallas and got much better results. I had friends who came over - I showed them what I was doing - and after a few months there were a lot of deep fringe antenna setups all over town. So many, in fact, that the cable company started carrying Dallas FM because of the demand. I made some money doing setups - most of it from adult classical fans who wanted to get WRR. A lot of the kids had parents with money - and to this day Midland is a honey-hole for people wanting to pick up good vintage equipment at yard sales, second hand shops, and estate sales. Certainly a disproportionate number of great receivers among high school kids! Most of the couldn't care less about the fact they were getting distant stations. Only about the music, which wasn't available locally. DX was a means to an end, not a hobby.

Gotta disagree here, David. KOMA was in a different state altogether (still is and yet got that distant response. The wife and I were in chat with an internet DJ from Kansas, who said that KOMA was the big nighttime station for her and her peers, too.

Curiosity .... and malaise (as in RBruce's dull Midland radio dial) .... and teenaged restlessness turned some people into avid DXers. Of course, some of those dial-tuning folks never became fetishists who stayed up all night on school Monday mornings trying for a 'K' or a 'W' call like we did .

I had asked a few people at work here -- Shamokin-Pottsville-Frackville folks -- what they used to listen to at night.
This region had no big-signalled pop music station in the 60's.
Almost to a person, the response I got was 'WKBW', 'WABC' and 'WLS'.

Your mileage may vary, but to me, that pioneering was 'DX'.

There was no a-ha moment for me. As long as I could remember, I wanted to be involved in some aspect of broadcasting. At first, it was meteorology. In the 60s, we watched WMT-TV channel 2 from Cedar Rapids, even though it was the most difficult channel we could reliably receive. My heroes in no particular order were Dr. Max and Mombo, Conrad Johnson the meteorologist and news anchor Bob Bruner. None of them were particularly photogenic and they were all in their 50s or early 60s then. My first exposure to Morse Code was the severe weather sounder on WMT, which I later figured out was "WX". -..- --.-

On radio, however it was all WHO. Even near Ottumwa it was almost as strong as the locals, KBIZ and KLEE. In Iowa, we thought it was completely normal to be able to get at least half a dozen stations easily. When I was four and five, I had to tag along with my mom to the Standard Oil bulk plant in town (although I thought it was the book plant for years) My dad was the sales agent and ran one of the two bulk trucks. My mom ran the little farm store, kept the books and dispatched the trucks on CB channel 6. They would abandon CB by the late 60s, the band rendered unreliable by high-power pirates working skip. In the 70s as the business grew to include liquid fertilizer, Dad went back to radio in the 150 MHz business band. Springtime became rather hectic, and I suspect we unwittingly had a precursor to today's reality shows, broadcast live to scannerland. Both the CB and the 150 MHz rig were FCC licensed, but I can't remember their calls. Odd, I can remember a lot of broadcast calls, but not our own calls.

Back to the radio at the store, a table model Philco from the early-mid 50s. For some reason, we never listened to WMT even though it came in OK. Looking back, I think it was a combination of boring music on WMT in the 60s and the radio sat on a shelf that faced east and west, which favored Des Moines stations over Cedar Rapids. Sometimes though it seemed like my mom would try out other stations. Usually during the mid-morning, when WHO would go to Phone Forum which she despised, I'd get introduced to other stations that played music. Mostly it was KBIZ, but occasionally Mom would have the Philco find other stations, such as country on KWKY 1150 Des Moines, polka after lunch on KBOE 740 Oskaloosa and occasionally that awful, terrible rock and roll on 940 KIOA Des Moines if my oldest brother was in the store. He made sure our cars' presets included 890 WLS and 940 KIOA. WLS was a stretch for us during the day, it was where you went only when KIOA was playing a bad song. My earliest memory of WLS was a from a late night when my brother was listening to some guy named Dick Biondi. I wouldn't learn till much later that Biondi would become a legend in Chicago, and the dust-up that took him off of WLS to WCFL, whose pattern didn't favor us. It seemed like no one in the family liked the country music on KLEE, even though the car radios had a preset to 1480.

KLEE would later serve as my first job in radio in the early days of Docket 80-90. My interest in FM DXing in high school and college led me to 101.5, a channel that I learned could be a 50,000 watt station in Ottumwa. 101.5 was blank, however except for an occasional appearance from WBNQ at Bloomington IL and KAYL, Storm Lake IA. The FCC didn't allow class B FMs in Iowa, only Cs and As.
80-90 would change that. My friends I met at KLEE tried to acquire an FM channel in the mid 80s. Our first target was (1984) the construction permit for 92.7 in Ottumwa. We were going to get it and apply for a C1 on 92.5. This would have likely put us in conflict with KJJY in Des Moines (Ankeny) which was then on the class A only channel of 106.3 and who wanted a 50,000 watt station. The only way they could get it was by dropping in TWO C2s. In the wide open 80s, that's how you easily could get an upgrade. KJJY dropped in 92.5 and 107.5 as class C2s, and took 92.5 for itself, leaving 106.3 and 107.5 for future applicants, rather, attacks by "paper tigers." We couldn't acquire the 92.7 CP, so in 1985, my friends made an attempt to buy 106.3 KXOF, 20 miles south of Ottumwa in Bloomfield. This didn't pan out either. Biggest problem was that we were young, dumb , in our twenties. Had we known KJJY's interest in upgrading, we might have prevented (or at least delayed) the creation of the C2s on 92.5 and 107.5 in Des Moines. The Fuller-Jeffrey folks at KJJY might have been willing to help out my friends purchase of KXOF, which would then have gone C2 on 106.1, opening the way for KJJY to go C2 on 106.3.

But our timing just wasn't right, so later we made an attempt to drop in 101.5 at Eddyville, NW of Ottumwa. We were hoping to get a C1, but by 1987, the FCC opened up the former class A only channels for any class of channel. KBKB, 101.7 at Fort Madison,IA wanted to go from A to C2. They could have enjoyed better coverage of Fort Madison as well as the more populous river city of Burlington from a site across the river in Illinois, but you can't have a C2 in B land. So KBKB got their C2 at Fort Madison, 101.5 got pushed to a C2, and between fate (my friend's wealthy grand-uncle who believed in the project died) and other rookie errors, we lost control of our O-Town Communications. My friend who financed the paperwork by living at home in Ottumwa while rebuilding 103.3 at Pella from its original site to a location closer to Des Moines, kept a minority interest in O-Town for a few years, but later sold out to the current owners, which ended up buying up all the Ottumwa radio stations.

This doesn't necessarily have much to do with DXing, but FM DXing led me to gain a knowledge of the band and where the channels would fit. The only problem is that unlike chess, playing Docket 80-90 took money, and we didn't have it. We wanted to be the next KRNA, Iowa City, started in 1975 by a bunch of young guys in twenties. They had access to money, ultimately we didn't.

My apologies for what seems to be an issue I'm having with duplicate posts. I;m not sure what's going on, but I'll try to resolve it.