Wednesday, November 4, 2009

636 Miles

I was sitting in my car at a traffic light, listening to the radio, just before 6pm tonight. There was nothing on my band of 6 "FM2" stations, so I pressed the button to go back to "FM1" and check them. In between is AM, which I usually skip over without stopping. In fact, I haven't touched my AM dial, so it's still set to KYW 1060 from Philly. It's normally just static.

Tonight, I heard a voice talking on the station. It was a weather report. I was intrigued. Then I hear it "KWY news time...". Wow. AM radio is bizarre. It traveled over 600 miles, over mountains and all to get to my little car radio. I looked up how AM radio works - apparently at night it's something with the ionosphere bouncing the waves back to earth, which can happen multiple times if the conditions are right. Almost like a natural satellite. Weird.

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