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While I love Dieter Rams’ designs, and no doubt this is a very rare piece in “almost perfect shape,” it is certainly well-beyond my budget at $11,000 US plus $600 shipping.
Admittedly, though, if I were building a modern house and wanted a feature piece of functional artwork, the Braun Wall Unit may very well fit the bill. Most of Rams’ designs certainly seem to hold or increase in value over time.
For now, I’ll just admire this design from a distance. Curious if it’ll fetch its BuyItNow price. Thanks again for sharing this one, David!
Many thanks to SWLing Post reader, “Mutezone,” who writes:
“I want to share a link to a video of Radio Serbia International’s English service recorded on the 4th of July 2015…
[…]I have been monitoring for RSI during the last week of July but got nothing. I have also been monitoring 6100 kHz after the July final date of transmission as according to RSI’s website, there are “Pirates stalking Serbian short wave” due to the termination of the station. However I have not received any odd transmissions on this frequency at the moment.”
Thanks for sharing this recording/video and, especially, for capturing RSI’s interval signal.
I was unable to hear RSI’s final broadcast on July 31, 2015.
Regarding the end of Radio Serbia International (or International Radio Serbia), the following final post was published on their website. I’ve included the full note, for archival purposes, in case the RSI website goes offline in the future:
The End of Radio Yugoslavia – International Radio Serbia
Thanks for sharing the recording and for including a few minutes of the RSI interval signal. RSI was always a difficult broadcaster for me to catch here in North America, though I heard them a number of times via the University Twente Web SDR.
Dear friends, Radio Yugoslavia – International Radio Serbia, ceases to exist on 31 July 2015. For you, our faithful listeners from all over the world, and also for us who have worked on this radio, the only consolation would be the fact that this only state short-wave station in Serbia, which has existed for 79 years, will be remembered as an efficient and reliable promoter of Serbia worldwide. No one has ever presented valid reasons why this media, of rich tradition, range and staff potentials, and with big plans until yesterday, should cease to exist. Unfortunately, the assessments not based on arguments were louder than serious analyses and recommendations of experts, professionals and numerous listeners that the world radio service is necessary for Serbia, that it presents the country worldwide in the best manner possible and that no serious state will renounce such an effective diplomacy.
Our significance has been confirmed by the letters of thousands of listeners from all over the world. Some listened to us because of our information programmes, some because of economic topics, while many got to love our country, Serbia, because of its tradition, beautiful and interesting landmarks and the rich heritage they were acquainted with by listening to International Radio Serbia. Regardless of your affinities, you have all told us that you were listening to us because of our objectivity and the possibility of hearing us at any time and everywhere, for such is the power of short waves.
The Serbian government, however, believes that the closing down of Radio Yugoslavia – International Radio Serbia – is a justified move. Regardless of the fact that the state of Serbia is in an economic crisis, that each saved penny is precious, that many citizens have been rendered jobless, that new work positions should be opened, it has become unclear to the very end why the only state short-wave station has suddenly become too expensive after 80 years. We are, however, certain, that Serbian citizens, taxpayers, who have financed us for all these years, would have decided differently had they been asked to.
What remains, after all, is the pride we feel because of the history of our radio as well as the hope that the voice of Serbia will reach our listeners wherever they are.
Thank you, dear listeners from all over the world, for having trusted us all these years! Radio Yugoslavia – International Radio Serbia now greets you and signs off.
Tuning in: Making a small world bigger and the big one smaller
So much of happiness, I’ve realized, depends on getting tuned in. When he was a young married, my father used to tune in the console radio in the living room of the Krohe family mansion on Manor Avenue to the live broadcasts of big-band music “from the beautiful Blue Room in the Roosevelt Hotel” in downtown New Orleans. He was able to be in two places at once thanks to WWL-AM, whose 50,000-watt clear channel signal was beamed north. For all I know, while he tapped his toe on the sofa in Springfield, Inuit couples were jitterbugging on the tundra.
For Springfield teens in the 1950s and ’60s, getting a chance to listen to what kids in bigger cities had already decided they liked was important. WCVS-AM was just crawling out of its cocoon, having crawled into it as a country station and emerging as a rock station – although in the late ’50s there wasn’t that much difference. “Rock ’n’ roll” was, in stations like WVCS that catered to mostly white markets, rockabilly and pop-ish country ballads. (Geezers will recall when Brenda Lee was, briefly and laughably, marketed as a rock artist.)
For Top 40 music, as for so many other things, if you wanted to get the really good stuff you had to go to the big city. Around here that meant WLS-AM, WCFL-AM out of Chicago (whose Ron Britain made Soupy Sales look, or rather sound, like Noel Coward), and KXOK-AM out of St. Louis. George Lucas’s American Graffiti brilliantly captured the ways that car radios, transistors, radio stations blaring over PAs in drive-ins, permeated the bubble in which teenagers then lived.
Later I learned I could hear WBZ out of Boston if I acted as the antenna on my transistor. (“Turn on, tune in, drop out” to me meant losing the signal when I lighted a smoke.) WBZ was one of the first stations with the newest 45s from Britain, which allowed us yokels to hear The Yardbirds while the records were still on their way to Midwest stations by stagecoach from Boston harbor.
Many thanks to Jarkko Mäkivaara with Siru Innovations who writes with the following update:
We have added some new features to our SDR20 portable radio!
Please see the video [below] for a demonstration of the following features:
* Smooth zoom in FFT/waterfall view
* Adaptive menu
* Frequency memory with snapshot pictures of signals
* Sliding effect between views
* Keyboard beep
* FM broadcast receiver
* Example of Ham radio transceiver with Narrow-FM mode
You also might got the email sent out Today where this is in HTML format.
SWLing Post reader, Mark, recently contact me with the following question:
“What portable shortwave radios under $300 have an option to have their memories programmed using a computer?”
I replied to Mark that I can’t think of a single shortwave portable that can be programmed via computer–at least, not a “typical” portable radio like a Sony, Sangean, Tecsun, Degen, or Redsun.
The Yaesu VX-3R HT tuned to the AM broadcast band.
I may be wrong, however, so please comment if you can help Mark identify a model.
I am aware of portable wideband communications receivers/transceivers that cover the shortwave bands: handhelds like the Icom-IC-R6, Icom IC-R20, Yaesu VX-3R, AOR AR8200 Mark III B and Kenwood TH-F6A.
Wideband handhelds are more akin to a scanner, though, and typically shortwave sensitivity is simply not on par with a dedicated shortwave portable. The AOR AR8200 Mark III B ($700+) and discontinued Icom IC-R20 may be a couple of exceptions.
Please comment if you can help Mark with his quest.
For the past year or so, I have been a big fan of said program, and I try to listen to it every Saturday evening (0000 UTC, I’m located in Delaware). When I am able to listen, I record the program using my Drake R8B, and I archive the obtained recordings on my website.
The link to the archive web page is provided below (scroll down to the 7375 khz and 9925 khz table rows). I was hoping that you might share said link with your readership so that they, too, can experience this (in my humble opinion) awesome radio program at their leisure!
Many thanks, Peter, and I’m quite happy to share your recordings. Like you, I’m a big fan of The Mighty KBC–we’re most fortunate to have a broadcaster like KBC on the shortwaves! I look forward to checking out your other recordings as well.
Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor, Richard Langley, for the following guest post:
Frequency Stability of My Tecsun PL-880
Recently, while recording the audio on a particular SW frequency unattended over night, I decided to set my Tecsun PL-880 in USB mode with the 3.5 kHz RF bandwidth setting as I had previously noticed splatter QRM from a station 10 kHz below my frequency of interest. I adjusted the frequency to the nearest 10 Hz for natural-sounding voice. On playing the recording, I was disappointed to find that the signal had drifted in frequency and although speech was still recognizable, music was distorted.
I decided to try to measure the stability of the receiver by recording the Canadian time signal station CHU on 7850.00 kHz in USB mode (CHU has no LSB component) over night for over nine hours. The receiver was operated with just its telescopic whip antenna indoors and the audio was recorded with a Tecsun ICR-100 radio recorder / digital audio player. I wrote a Python script to compute the audio spectrum of each one-minute segment of the recorded files using a fast Fourier transform (after removing a DC component). The script then looks for the largest peaks in the spectra centred on a specified frequency and prints out the frequency (to the nearest Hz) and amplitude of the peak. In case the signal has dropped below audibility, a threshold is set and if the detected peak is below the threshold (likely just detecting the random noise background), it is skipped. The specific centre frequency I was looking for was 1000 Hz, the frequency of the tone used to mark each second of the CHU broadcast except when the voice announcement and digital signal are transmitted. In AM mode, the spectrum would consistently show a peak at 1000 Hz but in SSB mode, the peak will vary depending on the receiver frequency setting and the actual frequency of the receiver’s oscillator.
The plot below shows the received CHU one-second tone frequency as a function of time (UTC) from when the receiver was first switched on.
It shows the tone frequency started out at about 1046 Hz slowly dropping in the first half hour to about 1012 Hz and after about an hour stabilized to 1011 Hz ± 1 Hz for the better part of an hour. (This shows that you may have to allow a receiver to “warm up” for perhaps up to an hour before attempting anything close to accurate frequency reading at the order of 10 Hz.) But then, over the course of the next seven hours when the signal was audible, the frequency slowly rose ending up at about 1034 Hz. The variation might be affected by the ambient air temperature (but this should have been nearly constant), air flow around the receiver, and perhaps the charge level of the receiver’s battery. On several occasions, I have turned the receiver on (after being off for many hours) and seen a CHU frequency offset of only 10 or 20 Hz. So, I intend to repeat this experiment sometime to check on the day-to-day frequency stability. This frequency stability measurement technique could also be used with WWV/WWVH by recording the 440, 500, or 600 Hz tones broadcast at different times during the broadcast hour.
Of course, it’s also possible to check the receiver’s frequency offset in real time by switching between AM and SSB modes while adjusting the receiver frequency in 10 Hz steps until the signal sounds the same in both modes. There is also freely available computer software for various operating systems that can display a real-time spectrum of audio passed to it through a microphone or line input. So, a CHU or WWV/WWVH test using such software could also be performed in real time. And alternatively, by tuning say exactly 1 kHz away from the transmitted carrier frequency in SSB mode, the software can be used to measure the audible heterodyne frequency to better than 10 Hz — even 1 Hz. This frequency can then be added or subtracted as appropriate to the dial reading (assumed accurate or with a noted offset) to get the exact transmitted carrier frequency.
By the way, it is possible to calibrate and reset the PL-880 using the procedure documented on the SWLing Post(click here to view).
As a side benefit of the analysis I carried out, we can also look at the quality of the received signal over the recorded interval. In this case, it is a measure of the level of a particular audio frequency rather than the RF signal+noise level we usually get from the receiver S-meter or other signal strength display. This is illustrated in the plot below for the CHU recording. As you can see, reception was mostly quite good between about 02:00 and 04:00 UTC and then became fair but above threshold level until about 05:30 UTC.
The signal was then essentially inaudible up to about 08:00 UTC when with bouts of fading it became audible again for an hour or two with sunrise approaching.
— Richard Langley
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