The recent detection of the “ cosmic dawn ” redshifted 21 cm signal at 78 MHz by the EDGES experiment differs significantly from theoretical predictions . In particular , the absorption trough is roughly a factor of two stronger than the most optimistic theoretical models . The early interpretations of the origin of this discrepancy fall into two categories . The first is that there is increased cooling of the gas due to interactions with dark matter , while the second is that the background radiation field includes a contribution from a component in addition to the cosmic microwave background . In this paper we examine the feasibility of the second idea using new data from the first station of the Long Wavelength Array . The data span 40 to 80 MHz and provide important constraints on the present-day background in a frequency range where there are few surveys with absolute temperature calibration suitable for measuring the strength of the radio monopole . We find support for a strong , diffuse radio background that was suggested by the ARCARDE 2 results in the 3 to 10 GHz range . We find that this background is well modeled by a power law with a spectral index of –2.58 \pm 0.05 and a temperature at the rest frame 21 cm frequency of 603 ^ { +102 } _ { -92 } mK .