Radioddity PS30 Switching Power Supply – A Review

By Robert Gulley K4PKM

Power supplies have come a long way since I started in amateur radio, and the behemoths of old are quickly being replaced with smaller, more efficient, switching power supplies.

I know, I know – those of us who have been around long before these little units became what they are today, cursed them with not-so-very-kind epithets because of the noise (read “dang blasted, infernal interference!”) generated by leaky components and poor design. Things have changed, and, as a rare example of something changing for the better, many modern power supplies are not only quiet both literally and electronically, they are easily portable and space-saving.

Enter the Radioddity PS30 Switching power supply. I asked Radioddity for the opportunity to test out this unit for review, mainly because I have had several friends get similar power supplies and they have been enjoying much success operating in various modes and bands without issue. None. Okay, that made me curious indeed. As always, I list pros and cons at the end of the review.

The unit is solid and the controls are responsive without any play. The unit sports a very nice LCD screen, allowing one to see at a glance how power is being used in volts and amps. There is a noise offset control to move a birdie should one appear on a desired frequency. That is, if you experience noise on your connected gear that you suspect is originating from the switching power supply, use the Noise-offset control to reduce it to a minimum.

There is also the ability to vary the voltage. With an adjustable 8–15V DC output (a fixed option at 13.8V for most radios) and up to 30A peak / 20A continuous current, it easily supports ham radios, CB radios, HF transceivers, and other DC-powered devices. Short-circuit and overload protection is built in via a fuse on the backside.

The unit sports two sets of Anderson Power Pole™ connectors on the front, and a set of terminals on the back that also allow 4mm banana-plugs to be inserted. Personally I like the multiple power connection options as I use all three options depending on the radio I am connecting at the time.

Reliability

For those who have been around a while you know reliability in power supplies is measured in years rather than months or days, so I cannot speak to the expected lifetime of the supply. However, in the months I have had the unit I have seen no issues with fluctuating power, noise (physical or electrical), or the controls. The unit seems well made, heavy enough to give it a sense of solid design, but not so heavy it would be an issue taking it portable, depending on your specific needs, of course.

Pros and Cons

Pros:

Small footprint
Solid Design
Multiple Connections
Adjustable controls for Power and electrical noise offset
Bright LCD Display
Quiet Fan
Detachable standard computer-style power cord. A simple, but nice touch I wish most equipment manufacturers would embrace.

Cons:

Front power connectors not aligned in the usual fashion. Traditional designs have the red and black connectors next to each other rather than above and below. Not really a big issue, but some folks have reset them (I would check before doing so to ensure that it does not void your warranty!)

Conclusion

I am impressed with the power supply and see no reason not to recommend it. With the cost of linear power supplies having skyrocketed over the last few years, modern switching supplies have much to offer, and the price makes them very appealing. Frankly, even if you had to replace one after a few years, you still would not come close to the cost of a linear supply (especially as there seems no end in sight to their cost increases!). Radioddity definitely has a nice offering here in the PS30. 73, Robert K4PKM

Don Moore’s Photo Album: Old Radios in Salamanca

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By Don Moore

More of Don’s traveling DX stories can be found in his book Tales of a Vagabond DXer [SWLing Post affiliate link]. If you’ve already read his book and enjoyed it, do Don a favor and leave a review on Amazon.

I’m spending April and May wandering around northern Spain and northern Portugal. My goal is to visit places I haven’t been to before, but I also have to return to Salamanca. I had been there twice before, but Salamanca is the kind of place that draws a person back. I love to wander the back streets of the old city. I also wanted to find some things I hadn’t done before, and that’s how I came across the Museo del Comercio (Commerce Museum) in a modern neighborhood east of downtown. That may not sound very interesting, but I knew immediately that I would have to go. One of the two main permanent exhibits is a collection of old radios.

Most of the items on display came from the collection of Agustín De Castro. Agustín was born in Salamanca in 1928 and began building radios when he was eight years old. Here’s one of his early radios.

As a young man, he went into electronics and eventually operated his own radio store and radio repair business in Salamanca. He donated his vast collection to the city in 2002, and in 2006, it became part of the new Museo del Comercio, which was opened in Salamanca’s old underground brick water cistern.

I might only DX on modern SDRs these days, but I still love looking at old radios. Everything here is in excellent condition and is kept in glass display cases to keep it that way. Unfortunately, that does make it harder to get good photos without getting glare or reflections. But I think these came out pretty well.

Let’s start with a closer look at a few of the more usual pieces.

The Gram Model 157 was built in Spain in 1947. I liked this one for the fancy logo on the dial. Note that while the medium wave band at the top is marked in kilocycles, the shortwave band at the bottom still used meters.

The Fono model 140 was also made in Spain in 1945. Again, the dial used kilocycles for medium wave and meters for shortwave.

This 1940 RCA radio/phonograph is one of the few items that didn’t belong to Agustín De Castro. What caught my eye was the original station list inside.

The LAK Radio was a small set made in Spain in 1950. It’s also medium wave and shortwave, but now the shortwave dial has frequencies instead of wavelengths. Likewise, the 1960 Vanguard Atlas from Spain uses only kilocycles.

Two Unusual Designs

The next two sets will show that there were some rather unusual designs coming out of France. This first set is a Philips A-48-U made in France in 1942. The dial is on a panel that folds down when the radio is being used and then snaps back up when it’s not in use. I think the idea is to give the user a way to put the radio away without having to move it. Notice that the knobs are also mostly hidden. The tuning knob just barely sticks out from the front of the fold-down panel. Two other knobs are at the bottom of the speaker grill on either side.

I wish I could have gotten a better picture of the dial markings on this, but there was too much glare at other angles. The A-48-U was only produced in 1941-42 in Paris, which would have been under Nazi occupation at the time. Nevertheless, the dial still lists Daventry, London, and Droitwich, although it would have been illegal to listen to those British stations in occupied France. The dial also shows New York, Boston, and Moscow, but it’s possible the plates were made before the USA and USSR were part of the war. Continue reading →

VOA Hitting the Target in Korea

1 Reply

Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor, Dan Greenall, who writes:

Hi Thomas,

Judging by the 60 dB over S9 signal strength on a Kiwi SDR receiver in South Korea, I would say the Voice of America is getting into its target area very well.

They have a Korean language broadcast on 9310 kHz beginning at 1530 hours UTC using their Tinang transmitter in the Philippines. I made a couple of recordings, which are as follows:

April 29, 2026, leading up to 1600 hours UTC (programming in progress), presumed news about King Charles’ visit, “VOA” heard a few times around 3:04 and 3:10:

April 30, 2026, starting at 1527 UTC, open carrier with tone, carrier off after 40 seconds. carrier back on around the 1:44 mark with English ID and Yankee Doodle briefly, then off, Yankee Doodle resumes at the 2:03 mark, then programming in Korean:

Since my original post on March 9, I’ve noticed the Voice of America is no longer using 7500 kHz for its 2200 UTC broadcast in Mandarin Chinese. According to short-wave.info, they are now using 9625 and 11590 kHz from 2200 to 2230 UTC. Shortwave.live has them here as well, but in recent checks using remote SDRs, I have been coming up empty on 9625, and a bit of a mess on 11590. Other listed times and frequencies checked for the Mandarin service have not been heard either.

Dan Greenall. Ontario, Canada

Carlos’ Illustrated Radio Listening Report and Recording of the BBC Emergency Radio Service (April 30, 2026)

Carlos’ Illustrated Radio Listening Report and Recording of BBC’s Emergency Radio Service (April 29, 2026)

Shortwave Memories — Go Go Radio Moscow

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by Karl D. Forth

Radio Moscow didn’t seem confrontational. We’re here, their attitude seemed to be, and we’re going to offer our opinion on things, which you may or may not like.

Looking at the World Radio-TV Handbook in the early 1970s, Radio Moscow was on dozens of frequencies from many different transmitters thousands of miles apart. The Far Eastern transmitters were 5,000 miles from Moscow.

In 1974, Radio Moscow offered programs in 64 languages, along with Russian by Radio, and a transcription service. U.S.S.R. was one of the largest broadcasters, with shortwave transmissions in many languages, from Bambara to Urdu.

“If you’d like first-hand information about the Soviet Union, its developed socialist society, the Soviet way of life and the Soviet view on major international issues tune in to Radio Moscow,” an ad for the broadcaster stated.

I thought that Radio Moscow offered a straightforward outlook, and they tried to make the programs truthful but were sometimes selective in what was covered. Their job was to promote progress that was being achieved in the Soviet Union, and to criticize the West.

(If you’re interested in the Soviet viewpoint from that time, an interesting book to read is Parting With Illusions, by Vladimir Pozner.)

One subject that got under Radio Moscow’s skin was NATO’s deployment of short-range cruise missiles in the early 1980s.

Later, there was Vasily’s Weekend, broadcast about 1990 and 1991, in the last days of the Soviet Union. The show, hosted by one Vasily Strelnikov, a Russian who had grown up mostly in America, was an informal English-language program of popular music and listener requests, a segment that must have stood in contrast to the station’s other programs.

Moscow’s exit from shortwave was sudden. It was renamed the Voice of Russia in 1993, after the breakup of the Soviet Union. The shortwave radio broadcasts were ended completely by Vladimir Putin in 2014.

Go Go Radio Moscow was an actual 45 single by Nikita the K, probably the only 45 record about a shortwave station. It was an American record and was not, as far as we know, ever played on Radio Moscow. (For the record, there is a rock band called Radio Moscow based in Iowa, not the Russian capital.)

Karl D. Forth has been interested in radio and DXing for more than 50 years. This story was included in the book Radio Nights and Distant Signals.

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DX Central SEDAP: A Sporadic Es Data Analysis Dashboard

DX Central Unveils SEDAP: The World’s Most Advanced Sporadic Es Data Analysis Dashboard for the FM DX Community

MANDEVILLE, La. — April 29, 2026 — DX Central is proud to announce the official launch of version 2.0 of our popular Sporadic Es Data Analysis Project (SEDAP), a revolutionary, interactive intelligence dashboard designed to decode the mysteries of VHF propagation. Officially unlocking on Friday, May 1, 2026, at 7:45 PM CDT (0045 UTC May 2) at fmdxdata.com, SEDAP transforms nearly a decade of siloed radio loggings into a massive, cinematic data science suite, completely free of charge for the hobbyist and academic community.

Historically, analyzing Sporadic E (Es) propagation on the FM band has been an isolated effort, with individual DXers tracking their own localized season-over-season metrics and comparing notes with other DXers. SEDAP shatters that limitation by aggregating more than 95,000 North American FM broadcast logs and presenting them with brand new interactive visualizations to give DXers a whole new understanding of this elusive and magical propagation method.

“For years, our understanding of Sporadic E has been largely limited to individual observations,” said Loyd Van Horn, founder of DX Central and creator of SEDAP. “By bringing all of this data together, we aren’t just looking at spreadsheets anymore. SEDAP allows us to physically watch ionospheric clouds spawn, compress, and track across the continent in real-time. We can finally see what a typical season looks like on a macroscopic level.”

Built on a Google Cloud BigQuery architecture, SEDAP boasts a sleek user interface featuring dynamic visualizations, including:

The Es-Cloud Tracker: The newest and perhaps most exciting addition to the SEDAP dashboard. The Es-Cloud Tracker is a cinematic, multi-day playback engine that maps the approximate geographic formation location of FM DX Sporadic Es ionization clouds over North America. Openings can be “played” on a timelapse, allowing DXers to watch a simulation of the Es clouds as they develop, morph and transit throughout the day or a range of days.
Path Line Analysis: In-depth analysis on the most common and productive paths to and from a DXer or station location. Visually “see” the paths that evolved over the span of a day or date range.
Frequency & MUF Forensics: An interactive “SDR Tuner” interface to interrogate large scale band yields, signal paths, and daily Maximum Usable Frequency (MUF) ceilings.
Station & RDS Intelligence: Deep-dive forensics into the WTFDA station database, featuring PI-Code adoption maps, format/slogan correlation matrices, and gamified “Unheard Target” lists for US States and Counties.
DXer Network Intelligence: Long-term seasonal performance audits and multiple normalized metrics to filter out observer bias as much as possible
“We have certainly seen a huge growth in the number of DXers both reporting receptions and the amount of receptions they are reporting thanks to improved technology and resources from SDRs to propagation monitoring through Rabbitears and the FM DX Webservers,” says Van Horn. “So while we are not here to say one season was better than another, we can give DXers insights into Sporadic Es season that can help them strategize antenna placement and bearing, timing of monitoring, potential paths based on different periods within the season and a whole lot more. This is about improving our understanding of what happens when the ionosphere sends those FM signals back down to Earth.”

SEDAP makes no claim of ownership over the raw data presented, acting strictly as an analytical engine. The platform owes its immense capabilities to the unprecedented collaboration and public data provided by FMList.org, and the Worldwide TV-FM DX Association (WTFDA).

To protect the integrity of the database and respect the bandwidth of its data partners, SEDAP is strictly governed by a non-commercial usage policy. Automated scraping and commercial monetization are prohibited, but users are highly encouraged to explore, share, and cite the dashboard’s findings.

The Sporadic Es Data Analysis Project will be accessible to the public beginning May 1, 2026. To access the dashboard, view the real-time launch countdown, or read the full data usage policy, visit fmdxdata.com.

About DX Central: Based in Mandeville, Louisiana, DX Central is a premier hub for the radio monitoring community, dedicated to advancing the hobby of DXing through live streams, online receivers, regular DX challenges and contests, educational content, and data-driven propagation analysis.

Media Contact:

Loyd Van Horn | Founder, DX Central

Email: [email protected]

Web: dxcentralonline.com

Youtube: youtube.com/@DXCentral

Twitter/X: twitter.com/DXCentral

Loyd Van Horn
W4LVH – Mandeville, LA
Member: IRCA/NRC Courtesy Program Committee (CPC)
Founder: DX Central – Because we’re all about radio
Web: dxcentralonline.com
Twitter: @DXCentral
YouTube: youtube.com/c/DXCentral