An overview of the study area
The lake inversion study was conducted in West Michigan’s central coastal region consisting of the cities of Grand Haven, Muskegon, Fremont, and Hart. Logs were compiled over four years in multiple locations spanning from 25 miles inland to the sand dunes that line the Lake Michigan shore. The main study location of the summer of 2006 was Grand Haven, a beachside tourist town of about 13,000 directly across the lake from Milwaukee. Locations included in the Grand Haven study ranged from parallel parking beside the beach bordered by tall residentially-developed forested bluff to the top of a sand dune used to monitor duct elevations and heights. Northern stations were logged at the Silver Lake sand dunes near Mears and at Little Sable Point, across from Sheboygan, Wisconsin. The study area was split into four different regions to assist in understanding reception patterns.

An overview of the terrain (View Elevation Profile Map)
Michigan, a state having been greatly affected by a glacial environment, is full of small rolling hills called moraines. Such rolling hills play a great role in the reception, although usually the lack of reception, of cross-lake stations. Stations that cross the lake in low-lying ducts are prone to run into even the smallest of hills and never to be heard again. However, the region in which Muskegon, Grand Haven, and Fremont lie is nearly void of such moraines due to the presence of the Grand River and Muskegon River. This terrain, surrounded by small recessional moraines, allows for unhampered inland reception in this region for up to 30 miles in some areas, easily sending Chicagoland and Milwaukee stations inland to Fremont, where elevation quickly rises and a moraine landscape takes over.

The 2006 FM DX Log is the final product of four years of lake inversion research. This research was concluded with a final summer season of cross-lake tropo based in the ideal location of Grand Haven, Michigan, due east of Milwaukee on the beaches of Lake Michigan. The log can be downloaded in full (above) or in individual parts, as detailed below. The 2006 TV log, both E-Skip and Tropo, is included in this document. Maps, graphics, and data are included in the report, which makes up the initial 43 pages. This 43-page report is the largest collection of research on a lake inversion's effect on communications. Assisted by past research, public information, meteorologists, other radio hobbyists, and a car radio, this unscientific report includes virtually all of the collected data of Chris Kadlec's radio studies along the shores of the Great Lakes.

In the summer of 2003, a digital log was kept of all stations received. Studies that summer were based in Muskegon, concentrating on the forested areas north of the city. However, the downside of the report was its organization. Organized by station as opposed to actual event, the log cannot be used to establish any specific patterns of reception. Compounding this, the logs were mostly taken inland instead of on the beach. This does not, however, prove useless.  Written logs show stations as logged by event, much as they do in every year since 2002, but the logs cannot compare to the sheer accuracy of the Grand Haven beach logs of 2006. The 2003 log is provided to supplement the final log of 2006. The science of lake inversions and their effect on communications signals was not fully understood at the time of this log.