Listening to midnight radio.

All from my little AM radio.
Back in 1951 and before our first TV and I Love Lucy, I was a frequent radio listener. We were living in Los Angeles and we had a Sears AM radio/record player console in our tiny Livingroom. A big wooden mahogany box that stood up and about the same size as our Maytag automatic clothe washer. In the front and down below where most people would place albums and single records, we had a full volume of the World Encyclopedia. We had only one 78-RPM record of the Cordettes and Mr. Sandman, Bring me a Dream.
Most evenings, I would be cross legged on the floor reading the Encyclopedia and listening to Dragnet or The Great Gildersleeve. I must had been about seven years old back then.
Fast forward about three or four decades and after TV was morphing into cable and most people were listening to current music on FM radio, I discovered overnight radio called DX’ing. I really didn’t know what they called it but later there were others listening late at night and they called it DX’ing. Not sure why but there were a bunch of us. What is it? Late in the evening and over night and if the clouds and Ionosphere were in alignment one could pick up AM radio on your little AM receiver or pocket radio from a great distance. From our house in Tulsa and late at night I could receive radio signals from WGN in Chicago, KOA in Denver, WLW Cincinnati, and sometimes if the clouds were just right, signals from KFI in Los Angeles. Never mind the two mountain ranges in between. I listened with great interest to WWL in New Orleans after hurricane Katrina. Regular programming had been suspended for at least a month. What a mess. And if I woke up early enough before sunrise, I would listen to WBBM in Chicago and their weather and traffic reports. The snow season there must had been horrific. I quickly learned what the “lake effects” were. But anyway, I tuned in Saint Louis, Detroit, Des Moines, Kansas City, Saint Paul/Minneapolis, and even New York City. All this trying to understand how other Americans live and what they had to deal with weather wise or event wise.
Buy yourself a pocket AM-FM radio and some ear buds and try this. It’s fun and most interesting. However, I have succumbed to a radio App on my iphone called “Tune-in Radio.”
An Internet collection of thousands of radio stations worldwide. Some call it cheating. Oh well. Happy DX’ing.