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The Canadians Invade: Highway Advisory Radio Interference in Seattle from Saskatchewan (CBK)
Flammable cargo was prohibited under the Washington State Convention Center on I-5 last weekend according to the large Smarter Highways signs along SR-520 in Washington, as there’s some sort of maintenance happening. There’s a highway advisory radio station on 530 AM and I tried to tune in to see what it had to say about it.
.jpg/200px-Thruway_Info_(1).jpg "Highway Advisory Radio")
As it turns out, the station was completely unintelligible due to bad interference. I could just barely make out the fact it was a highway message, but not the contents, in my car radio. With my GE F-135 radio, I couldn’t pick up either so it was time to break out the big guns, my Hallicrafters 8R40 attached to an 85′ helical antenna and managed to bring it in quite clearly.
The station beat very closely with 530AM in my receiver making a very obvious beat note, but they identified themselves as a CBC station a couple of times and were playing PRI’s The World. Some digging about where CBC stations are located, and I was able to identify the interfering station as CBK AM 540, a 50 kW clear channel station broadcasting out of Watrous, Saskatchewan - about 1100 miles away!
Clear channel stations running that high power at night can definitely propagate that far – or further, an experimental station in the 1930 was able to cover the entire western hemisphere and was known to take requests from as far away as Buckingham Palace. There’s nothing that can be done in this case as the interference is coming from a licensed user in another country and happened due to natural atmospheric conditions. I guess the right thing to do is just hope there’s no important traffic information being broadcast during the nighttime DX window.
CBK-AM is the furthest distance AM broadcast station I’ve yet received. I should probably keep a map of some kind.
Spotty GPS is Interesting
I’ve just returned from Whistler, BC for the season-ending weekend on the downhill mountain bike park, and wanted to track my progress using Google’s free My Tracks application which records your GPS position on the map for review later. I’ve used it successfully many times to keep track of my biking stats and see my trail runs, but it seems to have had some trouble up in the mountains of Canada.
At the very top are the markers indicating where I actually was. All the other pins were recorded at the same time, but seem to have no particular relationship to anywhere I was at any time during the trip. Since Canadians have almost third world Internet, I kept data off to avoid $10/MB roaming charges. Android GPS devices receive some amount of GPS assistance from towers setting up, so this lack of a cell connection may have resulted in the unit using bad GPS data. Or, it was just a weird bug – it’s impossible to tell. The weather was perfectly clear and we were on exposed mountain faces, so there shouldn’t have been an interference or coverage issue.
I was quite impressed with the top speed I managed on my bike of 496.0 MPH, and a min-max elevation change greater than the Space Shuttle’s orbit.
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