NOAA90s-2

This is a great big mess of snippets from dozens of NOAA weather radio stations recorded in 1997 and I think 1998 just before the end of the era of humans giving the weather. The first 47 minutes and 18 seconds were recordings I made with my dual-cassette stereo system by plugging the output of an Alinco DJ-560T VHF/UHF amateur radio handheld transceiver that was connected to a directional yagi beam antenna up about 15 feet on a pole outside, into one of the mic jacks in the stereo. I digitized the tape in 2016, and recently edited out a lot of the silences between recordings of each station, and I've just converted it all to mono and equalized audio levels. At the time I was trying to capture every voice from every station, and I did not get ID's from each one, but I did get ID's from many of them. I recorded everything on 1 tape and then dubbed it over to this tape so I could have each voice from each station grouped together. So you will hear lots of voices from one station in a row, then on to a different NOAA weather radio station. I sometimes recorded over a noisy transmission I had recently recorded of a voice to get a better capture of a certain voice, or in some cases, some of the meteorologists announced their names on a few of the stations. There are recordings of stations from several states, as with the beam I was able to point at the one I wanted and null out closer stations. Most of these recordings are during spring and summer because those are the best times for tropospheric ducting caused by inversion layers in the lower atmosphere. So from the top of a hill in Atchison county Kansas I picked up transmissions from as far west as Dodge City and Goodland Kansas, lots of stations in Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, Iowa, Arkansas, some from Illinois, Oklahoma, Kentucky, Tennessee, and a couple from Alabama (including Birmingham at about 622 miles, and Dozier at a whopping 743 miles! My most distant catch!), one summer night. Often atmospheric conditions were not optimal and it got noisy, and you will hear lots of Heterodyning when the main signal I was after faded or another station got stronger, as often happens if you listen to long distance AM radio stations at night. Sometimes it sounds like European fm cb during a band opening there are so many stations on 1 frequency. Towards the end of this segment you will hear from my 3 local stations KEC77 in Saint Joseph Missouri, KID77 in Kansas City Missouri, and WXK91, in Topeka Kansas. I could hear those 3 stations at any time of year. Sometimes you may hear other voices and music, I lived just 2 miles from the transmitter of KAIR 93.7FM, and it liked to get into my equipment if I didn't have wires placed just so in the room. The last 5 minutes and 46 seconds are through the air recordings made by a friend in Pittsburgh Pensylvania from his amateur radio handheld and a portable cassette recorder in 1997, and recordings by me through the air when I came back to Phoenix Arizona for a visit in the summer of 1997. Those were made with a small portable cassette recorder and a friend's mobile vhf ham radio connected to an outside antenna in Phoenix.