Was there a crazy weather pattern affecting radio reception in the Mid-Atlantic on Saturday, June 10th, 2006?

Question

It was June 10th.I was sitting at home(Staunton, VA) listening to the radio (I have a Philips AZ1574) and something very strange happened.I was listening to 89.9 and I decided to flip the dial around to see what else was playing.I turned to 89.7 and heard a station I had never heard before (and I know just about every single station receivable in the Augusta County area).I thought it might be the one from Richmond, but it sounded different, and it that didn't seem right, anyway, because we usually get Radio IQ from Charlottesville on that frequency.Then there was a different station on 88.3. 93.9, 95.3, 96.3, and on and on they kept coming in. Stations I had never heard of starting with the letter K.I could hear them clear enough, and I could tell what songs were being played, but I just didn't know who they were or where they were from, until I hit 102.3 and an ID said "Nebraska's Hot Country Y02."I couldn't ID any other stations but many of them matched stations in Missouri & Texas.

Answer 1

Disturbances in layers of the upper atmosphere allow TV and FM band signals to travel through "ducts" for several hundred miles. Sunrise, sunset, and some weather patterns can set up temperature inversions that bend signals back to earth 100-200 miles beyond their source. On rare occasions the ionospheric layers hundreds of miles up become dense enough to reflect TV and FM signals back to earth--500 to several thousand miles away from their source. This last kind of DX mechanism is commonplace at lower frequencies.

Answer 2

This isn't unusual. I used to skip around the AM dial if I was on a long, night-time road trip, just to see what crazy-distant stations I could pick up.

I once picked up a canadian AM station (CKLW, Windsor, ON) while driving past the US Sugar refinery in Clewiston, FL.