Some background

I have been fascinated by shortwave radio since I was a child, and heard my first NDB around the age of 11, using an old WW2 surplus Bendix radio given to me by a friend of my father. He said it was salvaged from a bomber, and I had no reason to doubt that. The band switch was not marked, and the frequency display was a needle rotating against a white card with hand drawn markings. I remember that there was a 5 and a 6, and near the 6 my best friend and I could hear some international broadcasters using a longwire antenna stretched out to a birdfeeder in my back yard. When the band switch was in a different position we could hear, with the needle placed at a certain spot, morse code spelling out “GR”. I now assume that this was the locator outer marker beacon for the ILS approach to runway 26L at Kent County airport in Grand Rapids (now the Gerald R. Ford International Airport). A few years later my friend took a private pilot ground school class in high school, and we learned about NDBs. Then while a freshman at junior college I sold my coin collection to buy a Drake SPR-4 shortwave receiver (Drake’s first all solid-state receiver) and was able to hear a few NDBs on the longwave band.

Although I did a lot of BCB, shortwave, and TV DXing while in high school and junior college, I really didn’t get into listening for NDBs until I trained for my private pilot instrument rating. I had bought an AOR AR3000A wideband receiver, and had put a discone antenna on the roof to listen to Lansing approach and departure, as well as dabble with police, fire, and other transmissions. After struggling mightily to master the notoriously difficult (at least for me) NDB approaches, I decided to see how many beacons I could hear — and got hooked.

My NDB loggings have occurred in three phases. From about 1998-2001 I listened using the AR3000A and discone antenna. I know that a discone is highly suboptimal for longwave reception, but it’s what I had, and it’s kind of remarkable that I heard as many beacons as I did. I think that the ionospherics were really quite good during that period, which helped a lot. My interest waned when I stopped flying in 2001, but I fired the radio back up around 2010 and dabbled for a while. Then in 2020 I bought a  W6LVP amplified loop antenna and put it on a rotator in the backyard. I got my old SPR-4 out of mothballs, and was able to hear a bunch of new stations. Sadly, I found that most of the stations I had logged earlier had been decommissioned, and I know that the hobby of NDB chasing doesn’t have much of a future. Maybe it’s for the best that my neighbor installed something this year that blasts out a horrific amount of noise, and I haven’t been able to hear many new stations in winter 2021/22. 

My NDB logs are not very extensive compared to those of serious hobbyists with their quarter-mile long Beverage antennas.  (Fascinating side note: I didn’t realize it at the time, but Harold Beverage was still alive when I first started teaching graduate-level antenna theory in 1986.) I hope that my logs hold some historical value to those with an interest in chasing NDBs.

Map of NDBs I have heard

Below is a map of all the NDBs I have logged. They are color-coded by power according to:

• Low power
  • 0-50 watts (black)
• Medium power
  • 51-499 watts (blue)
  • 500-999 watts (yellow)
  • 1000-1999 watts (red)
• High power
  • 2000- watts (orange)
• Power unknown (white)

You can filter by power using the legend in the upper right of the map. If you click on any individual icon you will see the call letters, frequency, location, observation dates, and power. I did my best to find the transmit power using a variety of sources, some official, and some the web pages of fellow enthusiasts. Take these with a grain of salt (and remember that power can change over time).  I did make a valiant effort to track down the locations of all the beacons, even those decommissioned long ago. I used the Google maps satellite view to refine the locations, since the longitudes and latitudes shown on many web pages (both official and enthusiast) are often inaccurate. Amazingly, it’s usually possible to pin down the transmitter location even for beacons decommissioned long ago.  However, some reported positions now reside in the backyard of a new house, or in the middle of a farmer’s field, and it’s not possible to guess where the antennas or shacks were originally located.

All of the beacons were logged at my home in Williamston, MI. 

NDB list

This table shows all the NDBs I have logged.  For quite a while, I only logged an NDB on first hearing it. Thus, many beacons don’t have an entry for “last logged.” More recently, I have made a note upon hearing a beacon in a new listening season, and this is shown in the “last logged” column. Also, if I could not find a reliable source for the transmit power, I left the entry blank. In the map above, these beacons are listed as “NDB power unknown.”