China On The Dial?

This is a thread I meant to start weeks ago, but for one reason or another never got around to. The problem is that because of this delay, I have forgotten some of the detail concerning the incident.

I was startled one evening to pick up, on my AM radio, a broadcast from Beijing. In Toronto, unlike Sarah Palin, we can't see Russia or China out our windows, so I was shocked to hear this program. At first I thought that some other carrier was rebroadcasting a Chinese news round-up, but when the station went to "break", even that was emanating from a studio in Beijing. This was all in English. It was pleasant, typical, slightly stuffy, "world service" style radio. No commercials, but the weather, including temperatures in world capitals.

The news itself wasn't particularly provocative or propagandistic.

I usually listen to Talk 640 in Toronto, or to 610 in St. Catherines or to the Fan 590 in Toronto. The Chinese station was coming through in a niche somewhere in that range. I moved on to other things and my favorites on the dial, but eventually I tried to get the Chinese station again and it was gone.

Was this an atmospheric phenomenon? Did anyone else experience this? Could it have been a test of China's satellite transmission capabilities?

If it was satellites, I thought, this is exactly what would happen if a war were fought and the west were defeated. All of a sudden, everyone would be listening to the opening broadcast of occupation radio, direct from Beijing, via satellite, traffic congestion and all.

Have heard of a few similar cases before. It is interesting...

It took China 12 months to get their own GPS/COM satellite constellation around Earth.

Whatcha think the X-37b has been tinkering on up there?

IF their satellites all continued to operate you would expect to pick up radio as well as "Free to Air" chinese satellite tv transmissions like we do around the world with Religious stations broadcasting over THEIR countries.

IIRC there's a few multilingual stations in Ontario. Might have been AM 530?

reply to post by vox2442


One of the details that I have forgotten is the call letters of the station. I don't think it was as far down as to be below 590. There is the french language network of CBC which I also listen to, but that is above 800 somewhere. This chinese station was nestled right in among my usual favorites, I believe, somewhere between 590 and 640.

I wrote the call letters down at the time. If they turn up I will look them up and post what I find.

sounds like your typical shortwave station.

not sure why it ended up on your am band...

On shortwave it would be possible.. On regular am/fm radio would say due to atmospheric conditions most likely..

I just did some googling and found out that it is possible to listen to China Radio International on AM radio in various parts of North America, including the Toronto area. Here is the link to a page with a map showing listening areas.

english.cri.cn...

I probably caught one of these stations during some kind of atmospheric anomaly because I don't usually get them and was completely unaware of their presence on the dial.

reply to post by vox2442


You must have been right about 530 AM. If you move your cursor over Toronto on the map of listening areas, a list of stations pops up, including 530 AM and 1540 AM. I must have been listening just at the right time to catch one of their Radio China International broadcasts. Problem solved.

If the conditions are right, and you hit the right time of day, weak AM signals can be picked up in certain areas of the world.

You probably just got lucky and heard it.

There is a lot of interesting stuff out there.

It must have bounced off the ionosphere.

The head engineer at cumulus tells me its possible under the right conditions,
it should 'not' be a constant,
he called it skip.
en.wikipedia.org...
The Earth's surface (ground or water) reflects the incoming wave back toward the ionosphere again. As a result, like a rock "skipping" across water, the wave may actually "bounce" or "skip" between the earth and ionosphere two or more times (multihop propagation). Since at shallow incidence losses remain quite small, signals of only a few watts can sometimes be received many thousands of miles away as a result.