Previously: 2022, 2020, 2019, 2018
Ball games are shorter now, with the combination of the pitch clock and the free runner in extra innings combining to make games closed to 2 hours than 3 hours. This means that late night baseball from the west coast might be done by midnight instead of 1:00 a.m. as it was.
My current setup for quickly tuning to far-away games relies heavily on work I did in previous years. Key to the effort is the international network of KiwiSDR receivers, which can be typically used to tune the AM broadcast band for up to 4 different simultaneous listeners. Some Kiwis will return 8 signals decoded at once.
The decision process looks like this:
- Who is playing now?
- What is that team's flagship station on AM?
- Which KiwiSDR receiver has good receiption of the flagship?
- If that reception is bad, are there any affiliates in good KiwiSDR locations?
My technology stack so to speak is Tailscale's "golink", https://tailscale.com/blog/golink which gives you named bookmarks. On my personal tailnet I visit the site http://go/tigers which redirects to http://go/wtka which then resolves to a specific KiwiSDR ("Pembleton Farms" north of here) at a speicified frequency (1050 AM). From trial and error and an annual opening day sweep I've pretty much dialed in my favorites.
For a map of KiwiSDR sites see http://rx.linkfanel.net
Alas this year I'm not going to be listening to as many Los Angeles Dodgers games, as my favorite listening posts to Dodgers affiliate KIKI 990 in Hawaii are offline.
"I'm rooting for the team that has the best announcers with good reception." This year I find myself tuning in Cubs games.
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