In this letter to the editor, the author responds to Mark Persons’ story “A Visit to “Shine 800 AM.” Radio World welcomes letters to the editor on this or any story. Email [email protected].
This article recalls the summer evening I caught PJB under the headphones on a Sony SRF-A100 AM stereo radio forced into its Magnavox/Motorola/Harris mode. That superb and now long defunct little portable radio does not need to see a stereo pilot to decode phase-dependent AM stereo.
PJB from Bonaire, CKLW(AM) Windsor, Ontario, and WLAD(AM) Danbury, Conn., were all coming in at about equal strength here in Wilton, Conn. Because their frequencies differed by fractions of a cycle, the radio decoded the constantly shifting phase differences.
Imagine yourself under the headphones as the nucleus of a lithium atom, atomic number 3. Swirling around your head in orbit are the three electrons. That is the effect created by the phase-dependent AM stereo decoder. Under headphones, it creates an image in three-dimensions of the three stations orbiting around in your head in psychoacoustic space.
This makes it possible to follow and copy any one of the stations by anticipating and focusing on its location in space to the exclusion of the others at any given instant.
It’s a wild and crazy but interesting effect that could be used to enhance an AM DXer’s ability to pick out and highlight one given station in a jumble of several.
— Dennis Jackson, Wilton, Conn.
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