I am in southern Ontario (just outside of Toronto). I want to listen to a radio station in New York City. The station doesn’t seem to come in using a normal radio set-up. Is there anything I can do to help my chances of listening to the station? Any fancy types of long-distance radios or super-huge antannaes I can build?
If it is FM you are pretty much limited to line-of-sight because of the frequency. If it is AM your chances are best at night because of changes to the ionized layers of atmosphere at night.
The problem with AM is that there is a large amount of atmospheric noise and the chances are that in the daytime the New York signal is smaller than the noise. If that is the case you’re screwed no matter what your receiver setup is.
Sorry, I should have mentioned. I want to hear an AM station (ESPN Radio 1050 AM to be specific).
Is there anything I can rig-up MacGyver style to get this? I fear there is a local station here in town on that ‘channel’, is that going to kill my chances?
Short wave fans can pull all sorts of things using something like this, but unless you intend to spend serious moolah on a radio, it’s a waste of space.
Alas in Toronto CHUM is broadcasting on 1050AM, so it’s all pointless.
Your other choices are either a webcast or getting ESPN radio on XM satellite radio.
It should be noted that XM is not “available” in Canada…
however…if you were to maybe purchase the equipment, and use the billing address of a friend or relative in the United States, you would find that the satellite signal penetrates pretty far north into Canada.
You might try a “loop antenna” of the wound ferrite rod type. I have one made by Palomar Designs (but it’s a few years old and I can’t tell you what, if any, version they are selling now).
This thing doesn’t look like there are any loops. It has a rod the size of a fat pencil, made of compressed and sintered metal oxides, that concentrates magnetic fields very well. This rod has wire wrapped around it to sense the magnetism changing, and it’s mounted so it can point in any direction. The box it’s mounted to has an adjustable capacitor inside that tunes it to resonate on the channel of your choice. You have to get the right rod (they’re interchangeable), for example for navigation beacons or whatever you’re trying to catch, but they did have one for AM radio (which is also called “MF” for Medium Frequency).
The beauty of a loop antenna is that its sensitivity is zero, in two directions off the end of the rod (or off the face of the loop if it’s the kind that actually looks loop like). You want this because you can point one of these zero sensitivity poles right at your local station, “nulling it out”, and it will vanish.
I think you can do this whole thing for $100 or $200. It’s small enough to carry around (but not convenient to move because you have to point it precisely).
Look around in ham radio magazines and websites, or buy an antenna handbook published by the ARRL (American Radio Relay League). 73!
PS “73” is some sort of salutation in the radio world… I dunno…
I looked into this a while back. IIRC for AM you can set up a wire antennia about 20?50? ft long, horizontally - this would be very directional. Your radio must accept an external antennia. Some have claimed to set up the above with a matching smaller internal antenna for radios w/o a place to attach an external antenna. I found these somewhere on the net, through a google search.
Also did you try to get the broadcast streamed to you over the net? Some stations do that.
DakotaDog
Where do you live? I’m also just outside Toronto and sometimes I do some DXing - Distance Listening. I’ve been able to pick up U.S. stations with nothing more than a standard radio and some very finicky tuning. I’d have to check my logs, but I seem to recall picking up EPSN.
Tapioca Dextrin
I live about 5 minutes from Durham Radio. Lots of nifty stuff in there…if only I had the $$$ 
The other problem is that Toronto to New York is something over 400 miles. Picking up a local station at that distance is going to be really tricky.
I live on the California desert and have heard WHO Des Moines (50 KW, clear channel) at night but it’s not something you can rely on. Des Moines is about 1600 air miles from here.
I was able to get WOR in New York occasionally from Sarasota, Florida.
It works best on cold, clear days. AM radio “skips” on the ionosphere.
Most radios have monopole antennas. If your radio has this, make sure it’s grounded to real earth. Ideally, the antenna should be one-quarter of the wavelength you want to pick up, but that’s probably not practical, as for an AM radio station a quarter wavelength could be up to 150 meters. Divide the speed of light by the frequency to get the wavelength.
Fortunately, you can put extra wire in loose coils to make up the difference, depending on how big your property is. You can also use inductors and capacitors to tune the antenna, but this is a bit trickier. You can also just make the antenna as big as you can manage, but it won’t work as well.
However, a dipole antenna is better. This is nothing fancy, just two wires in opposite directions, each a quarter wavelength long. A horizontal dipole is highly directional. You want a line coming from the station to your antenna to hit the antenna crosswise.
These are cheap and easy to build. However, they require a dipole connection. If you are using a battery radio, you might be able to get away with hooking one pole to the antenna connection and the other to the chassis ground. In this case, the chassis ground should be insulated from the earth.
Here is a good description of antennas: http://www.electronics-tutorials.com/antennas/antenna-basics.htm The terminated tilted folded dipole looks interesting, but I haven’t tried it.
None of the solutions cost a lot to try out if you’re willing to go hang the wire. The wire doesn’t have to be fancy, either, so long as it’s properly insulated at the ends. It doesn’t matter if the wire is bare or insulated; photons don’t care. You might want an impedance converter and a coax for long-term use, but you can test it out first just by taking the radio to where the antenna is.
Oddly enough, I try to do the reverse. I’m on Long Island NY and try to pick up
a Hamilton ON station, CHML. They carry Maple Leafs broadcasts.
I only get them at night. (Also we don’t have a local 900 kHz station to compete with).
There’s also tropospheric ducting, which is like an unexpected wormhole that opens up at random places in the radio universe.
One afternoon, while I was driving through what would normally be a radio wasteland in west Texas, I noticed that the FM band was packed with stations, in formats that seems uncharacteristic for cowboy country. All of them had “W” call letters. I tuned around for a while, and noticed that most f the place names mentioned were from western Florida; Tampa, Bradenton, Sarasota and thereabouts. Strange hearing stations advertise events in Ybor City, while I’m halfway between Roswell and Lubbock.