Wow, that's an amazing list of catches. As you know, it often happens when it gets this hot this early in the year. Hopefully, more to come in the unsettled days ahead. Thursday is supposed to be a scorcher. We'll see if it helps strike up the "band,"

Yesterday at around 4 PM I was getting a Latin Station from Miami on 93,9 FM in the car. Lasted a good 15 mins. When I got home all seemed quiet on the DX front but a few hours later I briefly picked up two surprising catches, Jet FM from Nebraska at 93.9 and Bull FM from Houston TX at 100,3. I was able to record brief segments of both and will post the samples when and if I get more interesting catches this summer. The Texas catch is the farthest south I have gotten on FM. Usually on days with such catches I am able to pick up more but aside from these it was surprisingly quiet.

Last edited by Fitz (June 28, 2026 1:48 pm)

RadioActive wrote:

Stayed tuned. Temps are supposed to soar into the 30s this coming week, often resulting in opportunities for some good catches.

Now I have something to do on Canada Day.

Fitz wrote:

One day this summer I was picking up a few TV stations from central Pennsylvania and just a few minutes ago I picked up low power station WBXZ ( Channel 23). The station has a whopping 17 sub channels. Most of them are not that great. Not sure why the time reads as 920. I think it was 1020.

Edit - the time on my DVR was not changed, BTW The station is still coming in at a signal strength of about 50 %.

That is an incredible catch. Ever pick up WBBZ ch 67? That is available in the GTA but only under tropo conditions.

Buffalo FMs came in this morning in Barrie, so thats about it for me lol 

Strong tropo this morning with a Syracuse/Rochester orientation. Recorded some interesting content such as the Franken FM 87.7 which is now the box playing 90's music. 93.3 Fickle FM  ( Roch) was featuring a syndicated show called Yacht Rock Radio. 100.1 had the Lake from Rochester which is light rock almost Americana. WBEE with HD 2. Rochester/Syracuse dominated the radio dial and bypassed the adjacent channel interference from HD in some cases. .

On the TV front Fox from Syracuse was coming in again and WBXZ has come in and out the last few days. Rochester CBS, Fox and PBS have been there any time I have tried today.

I thought the fun is probably over now  but I just tried now and there's still some tropo.

Those in Durham should try 87.7 for a chance to hear a Franken FM.

Will monitor the next few days and then post some clips.

Last edited by Fitz (July 5, 2026 7:04 pm)

Evuguy wrote:

I caught that opening this morning while in bed. I tuned my clock-radio to 92.9 and was getting WBUF, so I knew something was up. KISS 98.5 was as strong as Flow 98.7. A TV scan only got me WNGS 7 and WBXZ 23. The latter now has 17 services on it (aka 56-x)! I found the first program is encoded with MPEG-2 but the remainder are MPEG-4. This is how they are packing so many channels in. Problem is they will orphan older TV's that don't support that codec. It will also be annoying to tune through, since the other 17 will be in the EPG but show up in black.  Their call, I guess.  Also got WHEC 10 Rochester with the antenna facing Buffalo. I didn't get a chance to rotate it. Otherwise, it looked like the opening faded by late morning.

The 17 channels on WBXZ are useless for the most part. I edited out all but main one BC scrolling thru them is painful. I find the manual scan function on my DVR quite helpful in determining how strong a tropo is. Right now I am still getting Syracuse Fox and some Rochester.  The manual scan leaves all the old scanned channels in tact and you can add any new ones that pop up.