I was 10 in 1963 and an avid listener of CHUM. I had a GE portable tube radio on my night table. I can't remember which the first DX station was I picked up in north Willowdale, but there were a bunch all within proximity of CHUM. 1030 WBZ in Boston, 1090 WBAL in Baltimore, 1120 KMOX St. Louis, 1190 WHAM Rochester and good old 1190 WOWO in Fort Wayne. Thanks to them I spent a lot of time at night NOT listening to CHUM! I was fascinated that I could listen to all those distant stations and that was my introduction to the "magic" of radio!

Many years later in the early 80's, I modified my ssb CB radio to get frequencies just above the CB band and notched my first DX contact with a station in Norway.

As for the coming solar eclipse, I will be listening to the radio during that time to see if there will be any night-time like DX.
 

My father was one of the ordinary folks George wrote about 20 years ago. It was such a beautiful piece which I will always treasure. 

Solar flares primarily impact the medium wave to higher frequency bands. AM radio falls in the Medium wave spectrum (300 kHz to 3 MHz). Shortwave radio, ham bands and others are in the high frequency band (3 – 30 MHz).

 
When the effects of the flare first reach the earth, if the flare is strong enough, the bands can be wiped out immediately. I remember one day listening on one of the ham bands how a very busy band quickly faded into total silence. Some bands can go silent, while others can be very noisy static. Again depending on the strength of the flare, regular reception can return in as little as half an hour, other times much longer.
 
Also after a flare has ionized the ionosphere, there can be amazing DX/skip on many of the bands including VHF which includes our FM radio band.
 
If you are at all interested, here is a link to a site that I like to visit - https://spaceweather.com

A great episode that illustrated the "magic" of radio.

I've noticed the past week or so that during the middle of the night I can barely hear 680, I live in east Mississauga, down by the lake and after 1:00 in the morning it is barely audible. However this morning at 5:00am, bingo, strong as always.

My question is, does anyone know if 680 is running extremely low power overnight for some reason or is it changing its antenna pattern?

Tomas Barlow wrote:

I don't see many news outlets trying not to hurt people's feelings.  I think more of that would be a good thing, especially in the US.  Straight facts without labelling the other side racists, terrorists, nazis, pedophiles, traitors, criminals, etc, would be fine by me.  You don't have to call Trump a crook right after you showed me evidence that he committed fraud.  I'm fully capable of forming my own opinion based on the reporting, provided it's acurate.

Maybe we should just ban adjectives and adverbs in journalism as they are generally relative or based on an opinion.

Nothing but some sort of distorted signal in Mississauga.

I've listened to the Stef and Danny Z show the past couple of mornings and find it irritating. They sound like a couple of sophomoric kids on a college radio station. 

Yes, it's overkill. But is this much different from the CCN, Fox News and the other 24 hour news stations playing the same "breaking" news hour after hour, repeating ad nauseam. Or our local AM news stations repeating re-rolls from the previous days overnight and weekends. It's all mind numbing and that is what a lot of the media today has become.

RadioActive wrote:

-The Internet actually makes DXing easier in a way. You get a station and you think you know what it is, but you're not sure. You go to their website, hit listen live and if they're playing the song you're hearing (with a slight delay), you can confirm the ID without ever officially hearing anyone say it. Wish we'd had that all those years ago!

If I was still DXing these days I might do that. But for a crazy kid back then half the excitement was actually hearing the station ID.

Though I have never listened to stations on longwave (which is more popular overseas) it was the discovery of distant AM stations in the medium wave band that provided me with the first inkling of the magic of radio. I was 10 years old in 1963, and I had just gotten my first radio – some old tube job that sat on my night table. It wasn’t long before I discovered 1050 CHUM and the other Toronto stations around the dial. Not long after in the evenings I started discovering stations that weren’t in Toronto. I remember being amazed that I could listen to a St. Louis Cardinals baseball game on KMOX, or I could hear Fort Wayne on WOWO and Boston on WBZ. To a ten-year-old kid this was magic, and I was hooked. Every night I would abandon CHUM and scan the band for distant stations I hadn’t heard before and see if I could still heard some of the others I had heard before. I wish I had my old logs from then. Years later I got my ham radio licence, set up a 102-foot-long wire antenna (G5RV for other hams here!) and I was DXing the world. As much as I liked to talk, I was still entranced by the AM stations on medium wave and shortwave. The signals fading in and out, the static, stations overlapping each other was music to my ears. But like many of the old AM stations, the old ham shack is no more. The long wires and ham radio are in storage and I am left listening to mostly local stations in an RF noise polluted environment. I miss those AM dxing days. I don’t know if the younger generation will ever appreciate the propagation of radio waves at night and the ability to listen to far away stations like I did. Back then we didn’t have the internet to make it easy to listen to wherever wanted like today. Is the magic gone? I certainly hope not.

I used to listen to it and actually enjoyed much of it before it became a show more directed to right wing uneducated boors.

RadioActive wrote:

I realize there's not much point in complaining about annoying radio spots, but honestly, has there ever been one more aggravating than the current Spence Diamonds commercial?

Has there ever been a Spence commercial that is not aggravating. I will actually change stations when I hear one. I can't imagine anyone who is not on drugs that is influenced to go to that store as a result of their ads. And if I can ever afford to buy a diamond ring it will never ever be at Spence.

RadioActive wrote:

Vinay Menon in the Toronto Star has a good point, I think, as CNN may have gone too far in trying to turn its moribund ratings around. Talk about a deal with the devil...

CNN giving Donald Trump a town hall is a nightmare for journalism
https://clearthis.page/?u=https://www.thestar.com/entertainment/opinion/2023/05/09/cnn-giving-donald-trump-a-town-hall-is-a-nightmare-for-journalism.html?li_source=LI&li_medium=thestar_entertainment 

Unless Kaitlin Collins rips Trump to shreds, and she has the ability to do it, if they let her, we'll truly know what a farce and sham CNN has become.

I am very sad to hear about Don's passing. I was a fan of Don since his days at CKFH. I still remember the day he introduced me to the music of Tom Rush when he played Drivin' Wheel one afternoon. Who other than Don played Tom Rush on AM radio! I will forever be grateful. In 1982 I had the good fortune of being a DJ for a Day on his Lookin' Back program on CKFM.  Six years later Don was very helpful in directing me to my first job in radio. Not only was he one of the greats to grace the airwaves, but he was a real swell guy too!