Guest Posts on County 10 are provided by contributors and the opinions, thoughts, and comments within are their own and may not necessarily reflect those of County 10.
The roofing crew from Rico Construction was busy next door reroofing the neighbor’s two-story house. The rhythm of pneumatic air guns pounding away provided a steady, somewhat erratic drumbeat to the music the guys were playing on the radio. I’ve heard people complain about the sounds of saws and hammers, but to me its music to the ears. Sort of the same thing that my dad used to say when the odor of a feedlot grew as we drove by: “That’s the smell of money.”
The radio, mixed with the air nailer pounding away, is often the sound of summer, much like Wyoming’s two seasons, winter and road construction.
The radio is the focus in this piece. What would a job site be without a little music in the background.
I’ve done construction with my brother, ok not an actual blood brother, but a guy my mom considered a second son, Tad McMillan, and we always had music on in the background, sometimes on a battered radio we carried to the job site, sometimes just an FM station in the truck with the windows rolled down and the volume set to max.
In the summer of 1978, my father and I built a three-apartment complex on the foundation of the former Mt. Hope Lutheran Church in Kinnear. Mom and Dad purchased the property from the Missouri Synod Lutheran Church Office in Casper earlier in the year, and my summer job was to build the house with them in exchange for a new car.
Late that August, I drove a new 1978 Ford Fairmont 4-door back to the University of Wyoming.
Dad didn’t care for my choice in music, but he humored me by letting me set an AM/FM radio on the job site once we had the stringers laid and the deck nailed down above the basement foundation.
There wasn’t much choice in those days on “Your Radio Dial” as the announcers often say. We had KVOW, KOVE, KTWO and occasionally KRTR out of Thermopolis if there wasn’t too much static, and KDLY or KTAK FM in Riverton.
KTAK played elevator music when it first went on the air, not much to listen to for a young 20-something. KDLY had a little better lineup, though on occasion when a good song came on my dad would walk by and his Arkansas upbringing would come from, “Bunch of mess,” he’d say in commenting on the song.
A couple of times that summer, our FM lineup grew just a bit on every channel I turned it to.
When the weather is aligned perfectly with a broken pattern of cumulus clouds covering the sky horizon to horizon, you can at times experience a process known as FM Radio Skip. When this atmospheric condition arises, which is usually in the hotter summer months, you can get FM signals from thousands of miles away.
It happened with the now-defunct over-the-air analog television as well.
Without getting too technical, analog TV and FM radio shared a narrow stretch of frequency in the old days. Television came in two varieties, VHF (very high frequency) and UHF (ultra high frequency). Anyone remember the loop antenna on the back of the set for UHF? TV broadcast from 54 to 216 MHz. FM radio was a narrower band reserved from TV in the lower part of the spectrum, just 88 to 108 as you know since stations often identify themselves by name and number, The Brand 97.5, or Jack FM 105.1.
Channels 5 and 6 are in a frequency from 76 to 88 MHz, just below the FM band, that’s why they were viewable at the same time the FM stations came in; they were adjacent.
Both FM and analog TV were line-of-sight broadcasts normally. That’s why a distant FM station fades when you drop down into a valley but comes back as you climb up the other side.
When the atmosphere is right, all those rules go away.
The troposphere, the lowest level of earth’s atmosphere and the only area we can live in without technological breathing devices, is the reason.
When summer arrives, the troposphere will sometimes turn just as lakes do in the late spring, forcing air up or down between layers. It’s one of the processes that creates tornadoes; it creates long-distance radio as well.
As a high school kid, I discovered this one Sunday afternoon in the old chicken coop I’d converted into a room so I didn’t have to share one with my little sister. The monstrous, black and white behemoth of a television only picked up Channel 10, KWRB out of Thermopolis, but that day KWRB was fading in and out and another station was coming in. I turned the dial and found stations on channels five and six. I watched a half hour of Star Trek out of a station in Terra Haute, Indiana before it faded away.
That’s FM Radio Skip in action in the old days on over-the-air TV.
Now, back to the job site on that hot afternoon in Kinnear.
Yes, the clouds were all at the same height, sporadically spread across the sky about equidistance from each other.
Dad indulged me for a bit. I saw the clouds lining up, remembered how they did the same thing when I’d get a brief repast from Channel 10 programming at the farm, and started to turn the dial. At first, there were just a few, but within 10 minutes, every FM setting had a station. I didn’t listen to the music, just listened for call signs to see where they were coming from. That afternoon, they were out of the American South. Stations from Georgia, the Carolinas, Northern Florida, Mississippi, Alabama, and Tennessee filled the spectrum.
The old man told me enough, get back to work, and I did, but not before setting the dial to a classic rock station from Savannah, Georgia.
It lasted an amazing 45 minutes before it began to fade. We began to fade as well, as the clouds weren’t in the same pattern and were forming huge thunderheads. We picked up the pace, loaded power tools in the shed and continued working until a downpour came with an impressive display of lightning and thunder.
We don’t get to experience TV skip any longer, digital television arrived on June 12, 2009, and now it’s a completely different technology.
You can still experience skip on your FM dial, I did a few years ago coming home from the state track meet in Casper.
As I pulled up the deep draw west of Powder River, I noticed the clouds aligning in that familiar pattern. I set the FM to scan. By the Waltman rest stop, the dial was filled with stations, this time from Southern California.
The scan only stops for 15 seconds between stations, but I was entertained until it started to fade between Shoshoni and Moneta.
Just one of the many wonders the world can provide if you take the time to look, or rather listen.