O Holy Night
By Phillip Temples
My walk down a snow-clogged sidewalk in an unknown city is suddenly interrupted when I’m jolted awake by my bedside alarm. It was only a dream. The clock reads 2:03 A.M. I’ll be up and occupied for at least the next two hours. This morning’s quest: to try and receive radio station KXZ in Marion, Montana. It’s a 5,000 watt AM broadcast station that ceases broadcasting at sunset. But tonight the station has announced that it will conduct one of its bi-annual tests beginning at midnight Mountain Time. It’s the sort of thing that broadcast band DX (“distance”) enthusiasts like myself get psyched over—the chance to log a rare one. Yeah, I know. I’m a total nerd but I can’t help it. I have a file cabinet full of reception postcards and letters from all around the world dating back to when I was a fourteen-year-old kid.
Propagation on the medium wave AM bands is limited during the daytime to groundwave coverage, roughly line-of-sight, so the signals are received only about 50 miles away. And since I live on the east coast, station KXZ is one that I would never be able to receive during the daytime hours. At night, however, it’s a different kettle of fish—signals from a 5,000 watt station can bounce off the ionosphere and listeners across the continent—perhaps even Europe—can have an opportunity to pick up the KXZ signal.
The station engineer, like many of us, is a ham radio operator. He knows that there’ll be a hardcore group of us eagerly tuning in to catch some snippet of voice, music, or Morse code that we can use to positively identify the station and request a reception report.
I quickly throw on some clothes, head for my radio room and fire up my trusty T.M.C. GPR-90 receiver. The tubes from the fifties-era unit emit a gentle glow in the darkened radio shack. I attach my trusty directional wire loop antenna and aim it west. A few minutes later, I’m rewarded by the sound of an unmodulated, dead carrier on the frequency. There’s some fading; it’s weak, but readable. It has to be KXZ!
“Hello, test… test… test… Hehhhhh-lo.” The voice is followed by a steady whistle for ten seconds. Normally, engineers modulate the carrier with a signal from an audio generator but this guy is having a bit of fun. He whistles at roughly 2500 Hertz. He’s doing a pretty good job—the tone is surprisingly steady and pure.
“This is KXZ in Marion, Montana. Hello to all the hams and shortwave listeners out there in radio land! This is Clyde Ramsdell, KO7TAN, at the mic. We’re conducting our bi-annual KXZ test as required by the Federal Communications Commission. I’d be much obliged if you send the station a reception report along with a self-addressed, stamped envelope to Post Office Box 120, Marion, Montana. Be sure to include a solid thirty seconds of copy from the Morse code I’m about to send. In exchange, I’ll send you a very nice KXZ postcard along with a verification stamp. Hah. Just kidding. There’s no fancy verification stamp. You think we’re KFI or somethin’? But I will send you our plain jane card from the Little Print Shop.”
Clyde clowns around for a few more minutes. He tells a joke or two, then he says he’ll play some rock ‘n roll when he’s concluded his modulation tests. He plays a series of dual tones to achieve full modulation. This goes on for ten minutes. Then I hear him moving around in the background. It sounds like he’s setting up a tape cassette recorder. Then he plays a pre-recorded message in Morse code at around twenty-five words per minute. I recognize it as text from QST Magazine, the official journal of the national association for amateur radio. I quickly jot down one minute of the text and stop. That ought to be enough. I’ll stay up a bit longer to hear the rock ‘n roll song he’s promised to play...
I must have nodded off. The next thing I know I’m hearing classical music. My knowledge of that genre is limited but I think it’s a recording of “Ombra mai fu” by Handel. It’s scratchy, like Clyde is playing a record on an old fashioned wind-up Victrola or something. He seems to be quite the prankster.
“Ladies and gentlemen—my dear listeners on land and all of the ships at sea, I will now play for you Adolphe Adam’s carol, ‘O Holy Night.’”
The voice doesn’t sound like Clyde’s. It’s spoken in proper English and has an old-fashioned lilt. I guess Clyde must have dug up an audio recording of some ancient radio broadcast. Fascinated, I continue to listen to the solo violin performance.
“And now, I would like to share with you a passage from the Gospel of Luke, Chapter 2, Verse 14: ‘Glory to God in the highest and on earth peace to men of good will…’”
This is getting weird now. I reach up and adjust the tuning knob on the receiver to see if I accidentally bumped the frequency to some other station. That’s when I get the shock of my life—every frequency I tune to has the same signal!
After he’s finished with the biblical passage, the male voice announces, “…this concludes this first transmission from Brant Rock in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, United States of America. This has been your humble servant, Reginald A. Fessenden. I wish you a joyful Christmas in the year of our Lord, 1906, and a very Happy New Year.”
Before I can pick my jaw off the floor, Clyde’s voice fades back in on the frequency.
“Okay, all you cool cats. That was ‘Stairway to Heaven’ by Led Zeppelin. I hope you enjoyed it! This is KXZ, signing off from our test. 73, over and out.”
THE END
Author Bio: Phillip Temples resides in Watertown, Massachusetts. He's had five mystery-thriller novels, a novella, and two short story anthologies published in addition to over 160 short stories online. Phil is a member of the New England Science Fiction Association, the Mystery Writers of America, and the Bagel Bards. You can learn more about him at https://temples.com.