W8EMV - Whiskey Eight Echo Mike Victor

Software-defined baseball season, 2024 edition

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.

2022 software defined baseball season

Previously: 2019 and 2018.

2022-04-16: The great weird idea is to put together a guide for KiwiSDR and WebSDR listeners for tuning into remote baseball games. SDRs come and go, so any guide that is too specific about exact IP addresses is probably a bad idea. However, I should be able to map AM frequencies to grid squares, and leave it up to you to tune the receiver in that particular grid (or nearby) to that frequency.

Your reception reports are welcomed.

As an example: on a good night in EN82, I can pick up the following teams and stations (and more):

• EN82 DET 1050
• EN82 CHC 670
• EN82 CHW 1000

The Dodgers have an affiliate in Hawaii, KIKI; their flagship station in Los Angeles is KLAC.

• BL10 LAD 990
• DN04 LAD 570

There's a KiwiSDR in EN61 with excellent Chicago and good Milwaukee coverage.

• EN61 CHC 670
• EN61 CHW 1000
• EN61 MIL 720

To get a full database is a whole lot of work (!) so I don't pretend that I'll get everything, but I would like to listen to every team at least once. The hardest ones in general from past seasons are the San Diego Padres and the Toronto Blue Jays. Easy are the Detroit Tigers (which I can pick up on local broadcasts on AM and FM with barely any antenna) and the Chicago Cubs and Chicago White Sox (easy at night from here over the air on AM, and several good Chicagoland SDRs).

2020 software defined baseball season

Previously: 2019 and 2018.

The goal is to enjoy as much of the pandemic-shortened 2020 baseball season as I can via listening to far-away AM stations through SDR receivers.

I'm continuing to use the baseball section of my commonplace book to keep track of who's broadcasting where, and where you can listen to KiwiSDR or WebSDR receivers to tune in those broadcasts.

Two big changes in my listening since last year.

For East Coast stations, I'm more and more relying on listening through the WebSDR at K3FEF in Northeast Pennsylvania. WebSDR's can readily handle 50 or more simultaneous listeners, so there's less chance of congestion. This particular listening post will pick up stations from Connecticut to Washington DC.

In the KiwiSDR world, there are more and more Kiwi's that are using advanced technology to squeeze out more listening channels than the typical 4 channel setup. N6GN in Fort Collins runs a Beaglebone AI KiwiSDR setup that offers 14 simultaneous users. The usual tradeoff is that you get less of a spectrum waterfall display and more audio channels.

Some teams are easier to follow than others. I don't have a good way to copy Padres games, except via their Spanish language station. Phillies daytime games can be picked up via a station in Scranton, but 2000 watt WEJL drops down to 32 watts at night, not much of a powerhouse. Receivers do wink in and out from time to time, so any given listening suggestion is not a guarantee.

It's weird to listen to games, knowing that the crowd noise is synthetic, and knowing that some teams like the Marlins have had a piece of their season wiped out due to COVID-19. But it's still baseball - a weird, slightly mutant baseball, with seven inning doubleheader games and men on base to start extra innings.

2019 software-defined baseball radio listening recap

A good deal of my day to day upkeep of useful things on the net is at my Commonplace site on Netlify. This has mostly replaced blogging as my outlet for when I think that the Internet needs some extra words or links.

Some useful places have been the baseball reference guide, which tries to point to flagship radio stations on AM for Major League Baseball broadcasts, and then the AM broadcast section which pinpoints which software-defined radio tuners have the best reception of interesting stations.

DX'ing baseball is an annual upkeep effort. The first few weeks of the season you need to sort out which teams have swapped around their broadcasts, and which SDRs are new or are off the air. Once it all settled down for 2019 I was able to pick up most (but not all) stations of interest.

I tend to listen to night baseball so West Coast teams like the Dodgers and the Mariners got a lot of airtime. I also listened to a lot of Nationals baseball, since the signal on WFED 1500 is easy to tune to and the announcers are quite good.

With the baseball season over, thoughts turn to hockey. My favorites tend to be west coast Canadian teams (Calgary and Vancouver especially) because of the combo of strong radio calls and easy to tune in coverage.

KiwiSDR and AM baseball radio DX

The combination of KiwiSDR and sdr.hu plus Wikipedia's baseball radio network maps plus AM sports radio makes for excellent baseball DX.

It's a little work to map out what's where, but generally you are looking for a flagship station in the baseball broadcast network on the AM band, or a local station that happens to be close to one of the KiwiSDR tuners.

A search for baseball scores will tell you the current games, and then hopefully your notes are good enough to find the frequency that lets you listen to your favorites, to close games, or even just to the background noise of the crowd.

Most KiwiSDRs only allow four listeners, and many of them have timers designed to maximize sharing that limit use to an hour or so at a time.

More: reports of baseball DX on HF Underground.