Radio-Locator web site

[Alan Georges]

Radio-Locator is good for finding smallish-fringe AM and FM stations in your area, or quickly finding everything in an unfamiliar area.  Here's the web site http://radio-locator.com.  Go there, type in a zip code, and it hands back a list of stations in the area.  It gets clunky from there, but clicking on the little yellow "i" buttons next to the individual stations will pull up information on them, including links to coverage maps.  Those are kind of cool to look over.

From the search results page, there's another set of options at the bottom of that page: AM, FM, or both; reception quality or range; and sort by frequency, call sign, or format.  "Sort by format" groups things by "talk," "sports," "gospel," etc., and that's useful to sort out the stuff you don't want.  The reception range seems to go by the coverage maps, sorting things into  local, distant, or fringe.  That's way more useful than just mile ranges.

I've found a lot of interesting little niche AM stations with this site, playing Cajun, blues, classic country, big band, etc.  These stations are hard to find just rolling around on the dial, but if you know they're there, they can be pulled in with some tuning and turning of a radio.  Back to the survival end of things, a print-out of the sorted search results page for your home or bug-out location is a good inclusion in a documentation package.

What made me think of this was trying to listen around for some music to read by this morning.  Most of the regular bunch of little local music stations were re-playing last night's high school football games.  Annoying, but it doesn't quite rise to the level of the "Airing of Grievances" thread. 

[jerseyboy]

Alan.  That is a nice site.  It made me tune the ham radio down to the AM band.  I was picking up AM stations 60+ miles away in the daytime.  Reminded me of listening to AM broadcast at night on my father's ham radio when I was a kid trying to get the stations farthest away by waiting until the top of the hour to get the call sign, city, and state of the station to see where they were.

Jerseyboy

[Chemsoldier]

Cool website.

[Alan Georges]

Glad y'all like the site.  I've spent way too much time there, just because I think the coverage maps are so cool looking.

BTW if an AM station is near a body of water, especially a body of salt water, some of the daytime propagation distances can be amazing, and those maps show this.  For example, WWL New Orleans can be heard east along the Florida panhandle coast and west over past Houston, even in the daytime.  It's a useful trick to know.  (link: http://radio-locator.com/cgi-bin/pat?call=WWL&service=AM&status=L&hours=U)

[Alan Georges]

Radio-Locator has upgraded their coverage maps from static to zoomable.  It lets you see the whole coverage picture, at whatever level of detail you need.  For example, here's WWL New Orleans with the old static maps (I'm not sure how long RL will leave this up, but here it is):
http://radio-locator.com/cgi-bin/pat?call=WWL&service=AM&status=L&hours=U
and here's the new zoomable map:
http://radio-locator.com/cgi-bin/patg?id=WWL-AM
Zooming out lets you see that for example Tampa(!?) is covered.

It's a nice feature for those of us living near salt water.  Some of the coverage ranges were way outside what was shown in the old static maps.

[Chemsoldier]

Alan, great resource.  This thread is now a sticky under "communications."