Truth Radio signal picked up in Sweden a year after it was picked up in Norway

Truth Radio hits the "Swede Spot" when radio enthusiast picks up the WTRC signal near the Arctic Circle

A signal skip of Truth Radio was picked up in Sweden at roughly the same time of year as it happened in Norway last year.

In an email sent to Truth Radio last week, radio enthusiast Bo Olofsson, who lives in the town of Kage, Sweden, was looking for confirmation that he had picked up our signal while looking for skip signals from across the Atlantic Ocean.

His message says he was monitoring the AM band with 3,000 feet of wire on Nov. 3 when he picked up a bit of the Truth Radio morning show. It's a little hard to pick out at first, but here's part of what he was able to record.

Olofsson is a 62-year-old electronics engineer interested in what he calls "AM radio and its unpredictable behavior." He said the station was on his set at 1450 kHz for only about a minute.

Olafsson said he has been actively scanning the AM Band for stations bouncing across the Atlantic from the U.S. and Canada for 44 years, but this was the first time he had picked up WTRC 1340.

Last December, Truth Radio also received an email from a retired military radio officer in Mysen, Norway named Maj. Tore Vik. Vik picked up Truth Radio on Halloween in 2014 while monitoring the AM band in the same way Olofsson did, though he used an 1,800-foot antennae on the ice of northern Norway.

The fact that both men picked up the signal in roughly the same week a year apart led me to ask Greg Trobridge, our chief engineer for Truth Radio 1340, if atmospheric skip like this can be seasonal. Trobridge confirmed that there are definite seasonal patterns to the “skip” phenomenon, and directed me to an article on Skywave. He said something called Sporadic E Propagation is also a determining factor in how radio signals react to various conditions in the Earth’s Ionosphere at different times of the year.

As I did last year with Vik in Norway, I wrote back to Olofsson to confirm what he heard, sent him a few photos, shared a little of WTRC’s rich history and told him a little about our area.

He told me that Vik had shared his findings with a Scandinavian radio enthusiasts newsletter earlier this year, including the photos I sent him.

Where will Truth Radio go next year? Iceland? Greenland? Spitsbergen?

I suppose we’ll find out next December.

Tommie Lee is the anchor of the Truth Radio Early Edition News, weekdays from 6 to 9 a.m. on Truth Radio 1340 WTRC. Serving Elkhart County...and (it would seem) the far North Atlantic.

From the Elkhart Truth: http://www.elkharttruth.com/news/Truth-Radio-1340/2015/12/07/Truth-Radio-signal-picked-up-in-Sweden-a-year-after-it-was-picked-up-in-Norway.html