FM DX

Two years ago I spent some time DXing the FM band. Eventually I hit a wall which caused me to set it aside. The wall was the fact that the FM band in Toronto is saturated with local and semi-local stations. Almost every frequency has a dominant station on it, or is adjacent to one. Just about the only truly open frequencies are 90.7 and 88.1 (now that CKLN is off the air).

Recently I found a solution to this. Both Sony and Sangean have FM receivers, designed for HD Radio, that are highly selective. That is, they do an extremely good job at preventing strong stations on one frequency from bleeding over into the adjacent frequencies. For example, we have a strong local station on 91.1 in Toronto. On most of my FM recievers, this station also spreads over and covers 90.9 and 91.3. I figured that if I had a receiver that was selective enough to stop this from happening, it would open up a lot of frequencies for DXing. So recently I bought a used Sony XDR-F1HD on eBay to use for FM DXing. This is currently set up and connected to the indoor wire dipole antenna that came with the unit.

Today (Apr. 14, 2011) when I was trying it out I found that there was some tropospheric propagation happening, and that some distant and new stations were coming in. Here's what I heard:

• 91.3, WQLN, Erie PA at 03:10 UTC. Decent signal. Classical music program - NPR. Relog.
• 94.3, CJBC-1-FM, Belleville ON at 04:08 UTC. Poor signal. French - Radio-Canada. New.
• 95.1, WFXF, Honeoye Falls NY (near Rochester) at 04:12 UTC. Fair signal. 95.1 The Fox. New.
• 95.5, CJOJ, Belleville ON at 04;23 UTC. 95.5 Poor signal. Hits FM - classic rock. New.
• 97.9, WPXY, Rochester NY at 04:32 UTC. Poor. Hit music. Relog; new to Toronto log.
• 104.3, CKWS-FM, Kingston ON at 04:45 UTC. Very weak. Oldies. New.

Four of these are new to the overall FM log, so that brings the overall count to 324. Five are new to the Toronto log - the total count in that log is now 110.