Add my vote to this. The only station that had made it past 1954 in terms of playlist signed off at sunset. WLS, and later WKBW Buffalo, were my survival pack.
There was an AM station in Santa Maria, California that accepted a collect call from someone from Australia back in the 70’s claiming he could hear the station one night here on the west coast. They put him on the air for a few minutes yacking away asking him well he lived, what time of day it was, etc. I got this from a friend of mine who worked as a DJ during nights. He thought it was a joke till they showed him radio station’s phone bill.
Further recollections: Picking up KCBS in San Francisco one early morning in Phoenix, Arizona, a few minutes before KOOL started their broadcast in the morning. The furthest I ever picked up was a Nashville, TN station while living in Arroyo Grande, CA in the 70s.
The furthest I ever heard was a Los Angeles station from somewhere in the middle of nowhere, West Texas. (I was headed toward Andrews, TX.)
And although we got WLS, we lived nearer to WOWO in Fort Wayne and listened to that, or to CKLW in Windsor, Ontario. I still listen to CKLW at work when I get a chance although it’s now talk radio.
I got the power of Massachusetts when it’s late at night.
I got the modern sounds of modern Massachusetts.
I’ve got the, got the power of the AM!
Living in Eastern Washington in the late 80s, KGO 810 (newstalk) from SF came in clear as a bell after sundown. SF’s 680 (sports talk) came in very good, while LA’s KNX 1070 (news), Salt Lake’s KSL, and Calgary’s 1060 (Top 40) were listenable for long stretches. You could even hear northern Arizona and Denver on occasion.
Unfortunately here in Tacoma you’re lucky to hear even Vancouver stations for a few minutes before static breaks it up. KGO is still audible but faint. Why is modern day AM reception so poor?
Jonathan Richman performed at my college graduation party.
Got the AM sound, got the
(Radio On!)
Got the rockin’ modern neon sound
(Radio On!)
You were a lucky dude, indeed!
I’ve picked up French-language radio from Quebec City while in Northern Virginia.
Living almost smack dab in the middle of the country, I distinctly remember getting WWL (New Orleans), KDKA (Pittsburgh), KOA (Denver) KSL (Salt Lake) and a few others. KAAY (Little Rock and its Beaker Street nighttime program came in so clearly that I and a lot of my friends actually dedicated one of the five precious pushbuttons in our car radios to it.
Even with today’s lousy AM vehicle radios, I can still pick up KMOX in St. Louis all the way into the suburbs of Cleveland, even with Cleveland’s WTAM right next to it on the dial.
In Peoria, IL, I once was able to pick up a New Orleans station. Another time (driving from nearby Bloomington), I could hear a football game on the Virginia Tech radio network, so I assume it came from somewhere in Virginia.
Like many geeks of my generation, I used to carefully tune across the AM dial at night listening for distant signals, a hobby known as DXing. In East Texas, it was no great feat to pull in Omaha, Cleveland, Detroit, or even New York, and WLS Chicago came in so well I had it as one of my car radio presets. I don’t remember ever getting anything from the West Coast, though. The old tube radios seemed superior for this activity; I was especially fond of the ones found in Chrysler automobiles.
A few years later, I was listening to the FM radio (in a 1978 Pinto) one morning while nearing the Arizona-California border on I-40, when the announcer began talking about conditions on Interstate 10—except he was calling it the Katy Freeway. Yes, the skip was in that morning and I was picking up an FM station from Houston!
On the flip side, I worked at an AM station in Oregon that received a request for confirmation from a DXer (distance listener) in Finland back in the late 1970s To prove he’d picked me up, he had wound a small amount of audio tape around a 3x5 card and put it in an envelope. We carefully put it on a small reel and played it to hear one of our legal IDs faintly as it tuned through.
I promptly confirmed, and the DXer said he and his buddies in a listening club would visit a camp they had above the arctic circle and listen with powerful receivers hooked to a very long horizontal antenna. I believe they said it was approximately 400 feet.
Still, it was pretty impressive because we were running 1,000 watts at night, though it was directional toward the northwest. An over-the-pole skip is pretty impressive for a station toward the upper end of the AM dial at that wattage.
I picked up WBZ Boston in Englewood, FL back in the 80s, and also in Warner Robins, GA around 5 years ago.
ETA: both times on car radios.
When I lived in Toronto, and listened to AM religiously (this was back in the 70s), I could usually pick up Boston, Chicago, and New York on the radio late at night. Once or twice, I got Denver or Omaha.
I’m told by older radio-savvy folk that on occasion, and only at night, the Mexican border blasters (~500,000 watts) could be picked up in Toronto, but I think I was too young for those.
I remember driving from Columbus, Ohio to Ann Arbor, Michigan one night. My CD player was broken, so I listened to the radio. As I drove, stations faded in and out, and over the course of the drive, I listened to stations coming out of Ohio, Michigan, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Pennsylvania, and Ontario. It was pretty cool.
A number of years ago, I was driving home to the Bay Area from LA on the opening day of the baseball season. The Giants were playing the Dodgers, so as we headed north out of LA, we listened to the game on the Dodgers’ station. But we were barely out of LA (in Santa Clarita, IIRC) when the station faded away. Horrified by the idea of missing the rest of the game because we were still a hundreds of miles away from San Francisco, I switched to the Giants’ flagship station, KNBR on a whim. And it was coming in loud and clear! It was completely bizarre. Okay, I just looked it up, and the Dodgers’ radio station (KABC) has 5,000 watts and KNBR has 50,000 watts, but it was still weird that we were still in LA County and had to tune into a radio station 400 miles away to hear the game.
I have picked up several Los Angeles stations as far east as Amarillo, Texas. WRKO (Boston) used to be a 50,000 Watt station at night; in those days, I have heard it in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida (1500 miles south).
East Coast radio stations have transmission patterns that radiate north and south, so I suspect most of them would not be detectable very far west.
Zombie radio!
Back in the 60s, I could regularly pick up Texas stations in SoCal. Of course everybody in the country could hear XERB-AM out of Rosarita Beach, Mexico.
My dad went to Indiana in the late '40s. He used to listen to WOWO late at night while studying. He said they used to sign off at night by playing Back Home Again in Indiana followed by the Star-Spangled Banner. Growing up here in the Cleveland area, I used to get all ramped up about being able to pick up WOWO. The only way it would come in was by taking the radio into the downstairs bathroom and sitting on the floor.
And getting CKLW was a big deal too.
I recall a time when I was a small child (in the ‘70s), we were driving in the mountains just north of La Canada Flintridge, in the Los Angeles metro area, and we briefly picked up a station from Cheyenne. I remember my dad trippin’ out over it, rather than the actual broadcast, anyway.