apparent that there were significant differences in the propagation characteristics of various frequency ranges. Signals from shortwave stations, operating roughly in the range from 5 MHz to 20 MHz, were found to be readily reflected by the ionosphere during both the day and at night, resulting in stations that sometimes could transmit halfway around the world. Investigations of increasingly higher frequencies found that, above around 20 MHz, signal propagation by both groundwave and skywave generally became minimal, which meant that station coverage now began to be limited to just line-of-sight distances from the transmitting antenna. This was considered to be a valuable characteristic by the FCC, because it would allow the establishment of broadcasting stations with limited but consistent day and night coverage, that could only be received by their local communities. It also meant that multiple stations could operate on the same frequency throughout the country without interfering with each other. Because the standard AM broadcast band was considered to be too full to allow any meaningful increase in the number of stations, the FCC began to issue licenses to parties interested in testing the suitability of higher frequencies. Most Apex stations operated under experimental licenses, and were commonly affiliated with and subsidized by a commercially licensed AM station. Until the late 1930s, commercially made radio receivers did not cover these high frequencies, so early Apex station listeners constructed their own receivers, or built converters for existing models. On March 18, 1934, W8XH in Buffalo, New York, a companion station to AM station WBEN, became the first Apex station to air a regular schedule. Although most of these stations merely retransmitted the programs of their AM station partners, in a few cases efforts were made to provide original programming. In 1936, The Milwaukee Journal's W9XAZ, which initially had relayed the programming of WTMJ, became the first Apex station to originate its own programming on a regular basis. While monitoring the first group of stations, it was soon realized that, due to the strengthening of the ionosphere during periods of high solar activity, at times the lower end of the VHF frequencies would produce strong, and undesirable, skywave signals. (The December 1937 issue of All-Wave Radio reported that W6XKG in Los Angeles, transmitting on 25.95 MHz, had been heard in both Asia and Europe, while W9XAZ, 26.4 MHz in Milwaukee, Wisconsin had "a strong signal in Australia", and W8XAI, 31.6