AM radio check

I was up last night from all the fireworks and commotion.  I read that AM radio travels further at night by skywave so I checked what kind of reception I could get with the radio in our van, and also as a future check for our homemade radio reception.   Here is a list of the radio stations in Hawai'i.  And here is a site that will give the coordinates of the radio towers.  I was able to tune some kind of signal from all the AM stations on the islands except for one, KHLO in Hilo on the big island.  Many of the stations in Maui and on the big island were not intelligible.  However, I was able to tune in one station from Maui that was clear, and two stations from Kaua'i that were clear.  Here is a map (click for a larger image).

Icons in black are stations I picked up with the foxhole radio (during the day).  Blue are stations with clear reception from the van radio at night.  Red are stations with unintelligible reception on the van radio.

One station was unusual because it only had a three letter call sign, KGU.  I looked it up and KGU is Hawai'i's first and oldest radio station.  It went on the air in 1922.  It was used as a homing beacon by Fred Noonan (of Amelia Earhart fame, he was the navigator on their around the world flight when she disappeared) in survey flights of the Pacific in 1935 and by the Japanese in 1941 to lead them to Pearl Harbor at the beginning of WWII for the US. 

As an interesting aside, the first attempt to fly to Hawai'i was made by John Rodgers in 1925.  The plane landed in the sea and he had his crew make sails from the wings.  He sailed for 9 days and made it to Kaua'i. 

One surprise was a signal at 1700 kHz.  It was borderline intelligible.  The signal would get stronger then fade into static then come back.  At one point I clearly heard "ESPN Radio."  The nearest station broadcasting at 1700 kHz is in Mexico at the Tijuana border, XEPE-AM, and sure enough it broadcasts ESPN sports radio.  I also read that AM stations at higher frequencies are more likely to have long distance propagation.  It is 2,600 miles away.  This is equivalent to picking up the same station in Tijuana from Quebec City, Canada. 

View Larger Map

In fact here is a post about picking the station up from Ottawa, Ontario.