Longwave Dream #2
Once several years ago I had this dream, as is recorded in my Book of Dreams:
I had a dream the other night that actually there are longwave broadcast stations in the US, only somehow all these years I had never realized it. There was even an old radio in the storeroom upstairs which had a longwave band on it, right above the desk where I used to sit when I was a kid listening to AM stations on that old Stewart-Warner tube radio, only somehow I had overlooked this other radio, or at least I had never realized that it could receive longwave.
In this dream, the idea was that FDR started the longwave broadcast stations as a public works project in the Thirties, during the Depression. Then after WWII the longwave stations were retained as a sort of Conelrad network. Of course, as a government program, these stations had been continued as a legacy up to the present day, long after use and interest declined. Most people nowadays, I dreamed, were no longer even aware of the continued existence of these longwave stations, and many had never even heard of them.
Indeed, since the late Forties it was almost impossible to find a radio any more with a longwave band, Some radios from the Fifties or Sixties might have a "Conelrad" button, preset by the dealer to pull in a local longwave station.
In this dream I saw, as if on a map of the US, that the flagships of this longwave network were five stations which, between them, blanketed the entire continental United States, outside of a small patch of Montana and North Dakota. Five stations, in Philadelphia, Chicago, New Orleans, Amarillo, and San Francisco. Beyond these five stations, there were a more numerous group of "regional" longwave stations around the country.
In the dream, I took this old radio of ours, and I turned it on. After a minute, the tubes in it warmed up, and it hummed to life. I turned it to the longwave band, and started tuning around. And there, in the middle of the afternoon, I heard a voice, with station identification: "This is Longwave 207... WJZ, Chicago."
I got a station from Texas just above 250— in broad daylight— then I woke up.
posted by paul @ 8:06 AM
1 Comments:
Well your dreams may come true with the use of digital broadcasting. Main thing is that the long wave stations would have to spread out all over the country and the signals would be allocated from 130 kHz to 300 kHz the DGPS signals would have to be allocated to 300 kHz to 310 kHz and areonautical beacons would have to be reallocated to 310 to 530 kHz. Main problem is that this may not happen most stations used by areonautical and marine is the long wave band from 190 kHz to 530 kHz. We could start experimenting with long wave digital DRM broadcasting on 160 to 190 kHz. Analog broadcasting on MW is running out of room so soon in the future the FCC will have no choice but to start a new allocation of a long wave band for North America from 110 kHz to 300 kHz, but will be digital broadcasting only. We are running out of space for digital and analog signals on AM already.
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