I’m a ham newbie. Still working on my general. A few nights ago I was listening to 7Mhz and I heard a guy from South Africa here in Seattle. I checked an online map, and sure enough we were both on the grey line. Sunset here, sunrise there. Amazing
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The TV sets:
http://www.nostalgiatech.co.uk/Vintagetech.htm
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Cool! Thank you! That straddles the 6m amateur band which is known for some really fun long range communication. Going UK to NY means it could have been tropospheric ducting. But there are a bunch of other ways for a signal at those frequencies to have traveled the 3500 (give or take) miles.
I assume the audio was FM, so that wouldn’t have told us much cue to the capture effect.
Welcome aboard, @jake0748
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It happened often enough that RCA hacked one of their TV prototypes to be compatible with the BBC signal. (Incompatible video formats, nothing ever changes!)
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of course there’s the Alvin brothers classic “Border Radio”
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Over the years I’ve picked up Havana TV in WV, and Houston and Kansas City TV here in NY, the Kansas reception being right after a local tornado. During the Queen Elizabeth coronation in 1953 RCA kept a receiver at Riverhead, Long Island tuned to the BBC in case skip conditions permitted the signal to be put directly on the US network. Instead, they shot the coronation in segments on 16 mm film and flew it across the pond, developing it in flight, to provide a delayed coverage.
same energy
It’s like watching a scrambled Playboy channel trying to get a peek of something in the bits of picture that were visible. Not that I ever did that or anything.
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Wow, I had that album, back in the olden days.
It was not very good.
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He was secretly still alive and donating money to left wing organisations.
“IT cannae be Lenin. Lenin’s deid!”
The words belonged to Gerry Ross, shop steward at John Brown’s shipyard in 1971. Mr Ross had taken charge of a wheel of red roses with a hefty cheque attached. A gift from John Lennon to the workers of the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders, who were waging a work-in.
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CBC Radio?
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When I was a kid, I picked up KDKA a few times, in Northern Ontario. “Pittsburg? No way…”
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Not so weird. Amateur radio operators are familiar with these atmospheric conditions that rise and fall on the 11 year solar cycle and seasonally throughout the year.
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looks like a bit of an old cartoon at like 2:25. Some max fleisher-like rubber hose stuff. Wonder if any animation nerds would recognize it (I don’t)
Think even stranger… a rare phenomenon occurs and someone 1000’s of miles away, just happens to be recording it… hhhmmmmm 
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Side note: Baird used the bouncing-off-the-ionosphere effect for the first transatlantic television transmission, from London to Hartsdale, New York in 1928.
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I’ve never known anyone to be so wrong about any album as this.
NPR is American. Perhaps you’re thinking of the CBC?
CBC Radio Canada International broadcast not only on local commercial medium wave and FM bands, but also on global shortwave until budget cuts in 2012.
how can you see a candle burning a thousand kilometres away?
my dad used to tell me about growing up in northern manitoba in the fifties. they were far from everything. unfathomably far… but late at night, when the air was cold and still, they could warm up the tubes in the family receiver and pull in signals from across the continent.
i’m reminded of his stories as i tune my own receiver across the medium wave band on a very still and very dark night and pull in the analog crackling of amplitude modulated stations from far away, bouncing passively off the earth’s ionosphere.
every evening i hear guatemala, chicago, toronto… and a few nights ago i could hear WQFG689, the hudson county new jersey highway information station, transmitting at only ten watts of power.
how can you see a candle burning a thousand kilometres away?
when the air is still, and the night crisp, dark, and quiet… warm up your old family receiver, close your eyes, and listen.
you’ll hear the fizzling and crackling of the wick burning from halfway around the world.
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