Monthly Archives: September 2017

Ed gives this Realistic DX-440 a bath!

Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor, Edward Ganshirt, who shares the following:
I found this critter [a Realistic DX-440–see photo above] at a flea market. At first I pondered as to when I had my last tetanus shot before handling it, then again it had something that I see rarely in these portable radios … a BFO..!

I always said that a shortwave radio without a BFO is like a Harley-Davidson with a top speed of 25 mph, so I bought it. On the way home I could smell a barnyard aroma. I ruled out chicken and hog but I think it could have been sheep or goat. So I decided to see how well it works. It took a little bumping around with loose connections to get it working. But first since it was going to be taken apart to service the case and knobs would get a nice hot bath in a sudsy ammonia citrus cleaner with a bristle brush. Also the PCB’s would get brushed down with a mixture of denatured alcohol and acetone.

Now for the hard part: finding the rickety connections. This turned out to be simple, just inspect each wire at attachment point. I found 3 broken wires that were re soldered. Now it is together I am looking for a 9 inch antenna. The one here is not original it extends 66 inches.

As to it’s performance, This Hogg can go up to 75mph now that I have the plug wires on. The user interface speaks to me as a lab instrument more than a daily listener which I think will become its role.

Absolutely amazing transformation, Ed!

I’m especially pleased to see you’ve given this level of TLC to a Realistic DX-440. I regret having ever sold mine as it accompanied me across the ocean when I studied in Grenoble, France, for a year just after high school.

The DX-440 and I did a lot of travel and a lot DXing together! I hope your DX-440 takes you across the globe, Ed!

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Deal Alert: Tactical pack sale at Spec.-Ops. Brand

Video: Radio Prague promo

September 13, 2017: Update from WRMI–9,395 kHz on air at low power

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Many thanks to Jeff White, at Radio Miami International, who writes with the following update:

Florida Power & Light Company has announced that most customers in our part of Florida should have electricity restored by the end of this coming weekend — that is by Sunday, September 17. So we hope to be back on the air here at WRMI by that date or before.

Meantime, we have one frequency on the air at very low power using our generator: 9395 kHz. This will be on 24 hours a day with regular programming.

We are making repairs in the antenna field so that by the time electricity returns, we will be ready to resume our full schedule of operations.

Jeff White

Thanks for the update, Jeff! We’re all so happy the WRMI crew made it through Hurricane Irma safely and happy to hear you may have power as early as this weekend.

We’ll publish all of Jeff’s updates here on the SWLing Post.

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No power, but radioactive–!

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My CommRadio CR-1a, with an internal lithium battery, is the perfect off-grid radio companion.

Monday night, the remnants of Hurricane Irma moved through western North Carolina. Because the SWLing Post HQ is at a high altitude compared with the surrounding area, we received higher than forecast winds. Still, we made it through fine and feel pretty darn lucky.

Yesterday afternoon, even though we maintained power throughout the storm, the utilities company cut power to our road due to a tree that had fallen on a pole that also supported a transformer. It’s a tangled mess. Since there are about 17,000 without power in our rural area, it’ll be some time before power is restored to our road–likely late Friday evening or sometime this weekend.

Loss of power isn’t a major problem for us since our refrigerator and freezer are off-grid and solar powered 100% of the time anyway. We also have a propane stove to cook on and plenty of charged battery packs and flashlights (and at least half a dozen HumanaLights in service).

On the plus side? Even though our house is pretty RFI free, when the power is cut, it’s amazingly radio quiet.

I listened to RRI last night on the CommRadio CR-1a (see above). Later, I sat in bed with the pilot run CC Skywave SSB and tuned through the 31 meter broadcast band, the 40, 80 and 160 meter ham bands and the mediumwave broadcast band. Happy to say that the Skywave SSB did an amazing job–and propagation was decent. Reception was so good, it felt like I was camping in a national forest. Just makes one realize how all the devices in our home add to that RFI noisy environment.

We count ourselves lucky as news from all of the areas that took the full impact of Hurricane Irma is simply gobsmacking.

This morning, I listened to a few HF nets on the 80 and 40 meter bands with the Digitech AR1780–I noted no less than five hams reporting that they were operating on generator power. I believe this hurricane has caused one of the largest power outages we’ve ever had in the US due to a natural disaster.

Note that since I don’t have power at home, I also don’t have Internet service–keep this in mind if you attempt to contact me this week. I will post quick updates to the SWLing Post while I’m in town, however I will certainly fall behind on correspondence. Thanks for understanding.

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Shadows of the State: a photobook about numbers stations

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RAF Akrotiri, Cyprus (Source: Lewis Bush)

Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor, James Jordan, who shares a link to this article in Wired magazine:

IF YOU TUNED into just the right shortwave radio frequency in the 1970s, you might hear a creepy computerized voice reading out a string of numbers. It was the Cold War, and the coded messages were rumored to be secret intelligence broadcasts from “number stations” located around the globe.

Photographer Lewis Bush is obsessed with these stations to “an almost irrational degree” and hunts them down in Shadows of the State, featuring 30 composite satellite images of alleged number stations from Germany to Australia. The series took two years and endless research. “It’s a difficult project to quantify in terms of man hours wasted on it,” he says.[…]

When Bush finds what he believes to be a station, he takes up to 50 close-up screen grabs and stitches them together in Photoshop to create one high-resolution image. He also listens to frequencies where broadcasts supposedly still happen on radio listening software, taking screen shots of the software’s spectrograms, graphics depicting the sound spectrum.

The final images try to visualize something largely intangible. No government has ever confirmed the existence of numbers stations, and Bush himself isn’t completely certain of their locations. No one can be sure what these scratchy codes really are. And that’s precisely what makes them so intriguing.

Shadows of the State will be published by Brave Books in December 2017. Bush is also raising funds on Kickstarterfor an interactive companion website.