Doc Searls Weblog

I just learned from Dan Kelly that Bruce Elving passed away last month. Details are thin, but here’s a short list of links:

• Scott Fybush’s Northeast Radio Watch Augut 8 issue
• A facebook “public figure” page
• Bruce’s own Facebook page
• An obituary in Media Confidential
• Notice in the Worldwide TV-DX Association site

Bruce and I were frequent correspondents for many years, starting the early ’70s, when Bruce began publishing his FM Atlas, an authoritative compilation of technical details for every FM station in the U.S. — and an essential handbook for everyone who loved to listen to far-away FM radio stations. Those people are called DXers, and I was one of them.

If you’ve ever been surprised to hear on your FM radio a station from halfway across the country, you were DXing. From my homes in New Jersey and North Carolina, I logged many hundreds of FM and TV stations whose signals skipped off the ionosphere’s sporadic E layer.

For DXers, catching far-away stations is kind of like fishing. You don’t want to catch just the easy ones. For that you go to the AM (aka MW) or shortwave (SW) bands, where the big signals are meant to go hundreds or thousands of miles.

WSM from Nashville and KSL from Salt Lake City occupy what used to be call “clear channels”: ones with no other signals at night. That’s why WSM’s Grand Ole Opry, heard for decades (and even today) every night on radios in rural areas throughout The South , literally made country music. (I listened in New Jersey, carefully turning my radio to “null out” interference from New York’s WNBC, now WFAN, which was right next to WSM on the dial.)

But FM and TV are on bands where signals don’t go far beyond the transmitter’s visible horizon, unless the conditions are right, which isn’t often. That’s one reason DXing FM and TV was more fun for the likes of Bruce Elving and me.

In its heyday (or heydecade), DXing on FM was about hooking relatively rare and slightly exotic fish. The best months to fish were in late spring and summer, when warm calm summer mornings would bring tropospheric (or “tropo”) conditions, in which FM and TV signals would bend along the Earth’s curve, and coast to distances far beyond the horizon. Thus my home in Chapel Hill, NC was often treated to signals from hundreds of miles away. I recall days when I’d pick up WDUQ from the Pittsburgh on 90.5 with the antenna pointed north, then spin the antenna west to get WETS from Johnson City, Tennessee on 89.5, then spin just north of east to get WTGM (now WHRV) from Hampton Roads, Virginia, on the same channel.

Tropo is cool, but the best FM fishing is in times of sporadic-E propagation , when the E-layer of the ionosphere becomes slightly refractive of VHF frequencies, bending them down at an angle of just a few degrees, so that the signals “skip” to distances of 800-1200 miles. This also tends to happen most often in late spring and early summer, typically in the late afternoon and evening.

Thanks to sporadic-E, we would watch Channel 3 TV stations from Louisiana, Texas, Nebraska, Minnesota, Cuba and various places in Canada. But, more often, I would also carefully log FM stations I identified in Bruce Elving’s FM Atlas. From 1974 to 1985 (after which I lived in California, where FM and TV DXing conditions were very rare), I logged more than 800 FM stations, most of which came from more than 800 miles away. Bruce said he’d logged more than 2000 from his home in Duluth, Minnesota. I’m sure that’s a record that will stand forever. (Bear in mind that there were only about 10,000 FM signals in the U.S. at the time.)

For Bruce, FM was also a cause: an underdog he fought for, even after it became an overdog with his help. See, up until the early ’60s, FM was the secondary radio band in the U.S. The sound was better, but most cars didn’t have FM radios, and most cheap home and portable radios didn’t either. Transistor radios were the iPods of the ’50s and ’60s, and most of those were AM-only. Bruce championed FM, and his newsletter, FMedia, was a tireless advocate of FM, long after FM won the fight with AM, and then the Internet had begun to win the fight with both.

I remember telling Bruce that he needed to go digital with PCs, and then take advantage of the Net; and he eventually did, to some degree. But he was still pasting up FM Atlas the old-fashioned way (far as I know) well into the ’90s.

I pretty much quit DXing when I came to Silicon Valley in ’85, though I kept up with Bruce for another decade or so after that. Learning about his passing, I regret that we didn’t stay in closer touch. Though we never met in person, I considered him a good friend, and I enjoyed supporting his work.

With Bruce gone, an era passes. TV DXing was effectively killed when the U.S. digital transition moved nearly every signal off VHF and onto UHF (which skips off the sky too rarely to matter). The FM band is now as crowded as the AM band became, making DXing harder than ever. Programming is also dull and homogenous, compared to the Olde Days. And the Internet obsolesces a key motivation for DXing, which is being able to receive and learn interesting things from distant signals.

A core virtue of the Internet is its virtual erasure of distance. Anybody can hear or watch streams from pretty much anywhere, any time, over any connection faster than dial-up. The stream also tends to stay where it is, and sound pretty good. (For a fun treat, play around with radio.garden, which lets you “tune” between stations by rotating a globe.)

What remains, at least for me, is an understanding of geography and regional qualities that is deep and abiding. This began when I was a kid, sitting up late at night, listening to far-away stations on the headphones of my Hammarlund HQ-129X, hooked up to a 40-meter ham radio antenna in my back yard, with a map spread out on my desk, and encyclopedia volumes opened to whatever city or state a station happened to come from. It grew when I was a young adult, curious about what was happening in Newfoundland, Bermuda, Texas, Winnipeg, or other sources of FM and TV signals I happened to be getting on my KLH Model 18 tuner or whatever old black-and-white TV set I was using at the time.

When it was over, and other technical matters fascinated me more, I’d gained a great education. And no professor had more influence on that education than Bruce Elving, Ph.D.