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« on: February 01, 2014, 2259 UTC »
It was a Saturday in July, 2006 or so and I was in a hurry to leave the house to help with a film screening in a neighboring state. I had borrowed a Denon TU-1500RD from work as I was testing some equipment at home and needed something with RDS. I had a 6 element ratshack beam on the roof with a rotor, and I was just dialing around when I heard something I didn't recognize, it was spanish. I was pretty close the the Canadian boarder, so spanish FM was a rarity. I had the beam pointed south, and a few seconds later, the display lit up and said "Exa 98.3." After doing some research, I found out the station was just off the tip of texas, close to 2000 miles away. Begrudgingly, I had to leave, but on the way out the door, I called my friend across town and left a voicemail and told him he may want to turn on his tuner and see what he could hear. A few days later, we went through the tape he recorded and ID'd 26 stations in half a dozen states, some over 1000 miles away. The APRS map was full of red that day, and I don't recall an e-skip opening that good since.
Several years later, I was letting an FM exciter run some music for the house, and I had a Sony XDR-F1HD running with a wire dipole in the window. I think it was June or July again. I had a streaming station feeding the transmitter, and was minding my own business when suddenly the music changed. I looked at the transmitter to be sure it was still running and it was, then the music went back. This happened a few more times, and this time I looked at the radio, and it was decoding HD from a station I'd never heard of. Looked up the call sign and it was from the Phoenix metro, close to 1000 miles away. I scanned the dial and found a few others that were making the journey. I called the phone number for one of the stations and asked for the chief engineer, then proceeded to tell him his HD's were being heard almost 1000 miles away. He was a bit surprised.
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