Why Your Car Pulls In A Station From Three States Over After Midnight

The Simple-Fix PDF Engine — Four bucks and it’s just the process, no pep talk attached: pain scan, prompt vault, fifteen pages, and you’ve got one small PDF listed by the end of the week instead of spending a whole quarter polishing something bigger that never ships. Sixty-one people have run it through so far. For anybody with a folder of ‘someday’ products they’ve been sitting on since God knows when.

G.P.S. and the Lost Art of Getting Lost — The New Yorker piece kottke flagged this week says it’s about maps. Bullshit. It’s about the muscle GPS let us stop using: locating yourself, reading your surroundings, staying calm when you genuinely don’t know where you are. I buy it. Every road trip since the blue dot showed up I’ve caught myself staring at the little arrow instead of out the window. Every damn time.

THE TIP. AM radio does one thing FM can’t: skip. In daylight the ionosphere’s D-layer soaks up mediumwave signals and keeps every station local. After sunset that layer thins out, the signal bounces off the F-layer instead, hops a few hundred miles, and lands on your dial fighting your local guy for the same frequency. That’s how a 50,000-watt clear-channel station out of Chicago or Cincinnati shows up faint and ghostly in a Texas parking lot at midnight and is gone by breakfast. Every AM set has a ferrite bar antenna built into the case, and that bar is directional. Turn the whole radio, not the dial, and you can null out your local station enough to pull the skip signal forward out of the noise. Old DXers logged these catches by hand and mailed the station a card asking them to confirm it, a QSL card, and some stations still write back. Nobody does it on purpose anymore. Worth ten minutes after midnight with a cheap radio and a slow turn of your own wrist, just to hear Cincinnati, or something that swears it’s Cincinnati, elbowing your local guy off his own frequency for no reason at all.

Tell me what you pull in after midnight. ~ J.D.