Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor, Mark Hirst, who has discovered yet another radio in film:
Spotted this in the 1961 sci-fi movie, ‘The Day the Earth Caught Fire‘.
I’m guessing it’s an old military set.
I believe it is indeed, Mark! Perhaps an intrepid SWLing Post reader can sort out the model number? Please comment!
I’ll add this post to our growing archive of radios in film.
(Image: NASA – Hubble Space Telescope)
(Source: ABC Science via William Lee)
Astronomers detect signal from the dawn of the universe, using simple antenna in WA outback
They have picked up a radio signature produced just 180 million years after the Big Bang using a simple antenna in the West Australian outback.
The ground breaking discovery, reported today in the journal Nature, sheds light on a period of time known as the “cosmic dawn”, when radiation from the first stars started to alter the primordial gas soup surrounding them.
[…]The signal they’ve been looking for is a miniscule fraction — between 0.1 and 0.01 per cent — of the radio noise from the sky.
“It’s like trying to hear a whisper from the other side of a roaring football stadium,” Professor Bowman said.
The signal is also within the lower range of FM radio, so finding a place on Earth that is free of human radio interference was essential.
That’s why Professor Bowman and colleagues decided to base their experiment at CSIRO’s Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory, 300 kilometres north-east of Geraldton.
“Going to Western Australia and working at the Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory was an absolutely critical first step for us,” he said.
There they built a small table-sized radio spectrometer with a radio receiver attached to two metal panels that act as an antenna. Akin to a set-up from the 60s or 70s, the EDGES instrument is much simpler in design than bigger array telescopes around the world.[…]
Meteor that struck Ann Elizabeth Fowler Hodges. (Photo source: University of Alabama)
Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor, Mike Hansgen, who shares the following story from Forsythe County News (which could win Headline of the Year) and notes, “No One Is Safe! Build a bunker!”:
University of Alabama searching for family of owner of radio struck by meteorite
If anyone in Forsyth County knows the family of Eugene H. Hodges, officials with the University of Alabama are trying to contact them to talk about a radio struck by a meteorite.
Mary Beth Prondzinski, collections manager with the Alabama Museum of Natural History on the university’s campus, said the museum is searching for family members of the late Eugene Hodges, the owner of a radio of struck by a meteorite in the 1950s that is on display.
“The radio is part of an event that occurred here in Alabama back in 1954,” she said. “It was actually called the Sylacauga Meteorite Event. It fell in Sylacauga, Alabama, and it went through somebody’s home and struck the radio that we currently have on exhibit, which hit the woman who lived in the house.”
The woman struck by the meteorite was Ann Elizabeth Fowler Hodges, then-wife of Eugene Hodges.[…]
Continue reading at the Forsythe County News.
Credit: NOAA SWPC
(Source: Southgate ARC)
Equinox ‘cracks’ forming in Earth’s magnetic field
The vernal equinox is less than 10 days away. That means one thing: Cracks are opening in Earth’s magnetic field.
The seasonal phenomenon is known as the “Russell-McPherron effect,” named after the researchers who first explained it more than 40 years ago.
These “equinox cracks” are causing geomagnetic activity and bright auroras around the Arctic Circle even without strong solar activity.
Visit today’s edition of Spaceweather.com for the full story.
Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor, Peter Wilson, for sharing the following guest post and DXpedition report:
by Peter Wilson
Las Palmas, Gran Canaria, Spain
I have spent the last two months in Las Palmas, Gran Canaria adjacent to the Atlantic Ocean.
I travelled light and didn’t bring my radio/SDR collection with me.
A portable I saw in a local department store caught ny eye, and I ended up buying one from a local electronics retailer which had it on special at €55. It is a Sony ICF-M780SL which as turned out, is something rather special. It is a four band (LW, MW, SW,FM) DSP receiver, with an AM IF (LW, MW,SW) of 45 kHz and an FM IF of 128 kHz.
There’s too much hash in my apartment block to use it at home, but as I am a couple of streets away from the Ocean I intended to use it there.
Problem is there almost as much RF hash at the oceanside as at home. Also the Atlantic breakers crash loudly on the shore, and the wind can howl quite loudly. I did have some limited success and have included a couple of clips.
I discovered a better DX location at a small Plaza a short distance inland from the Ocean. There is an early morning peak for MW TA leading up to about 07:30 UTC (= local time)
The radio is used barefoot in each clip. There is some camera hash.
Here are the highlights:
1500 WFED booming with ID 5736 km
Click here to view on YouTube.
790 WAXY with ESPN Radio ID 6369 km
Click here to view on YouTube.
1540 KXEL 6935 km
Click here to view on YouTube.
1530 WCKY 6373 km
Click here to view on YouTube.
770 WABC 5459 km
Click here to view on YouTube.
1520 WWKB
ESPN Radio with sports talk. 5841 km
Click here to view on YouTube.
1350 TWR Armenia 5377 km
Click here to view on YouTube.
1521 Duba Saudi Arabia 5004 km
Click here to view on YouTube.
1458 Lyca Radio, Brookmans Park UK 2914 km
Click here to view on YouTube.
The Sony ICF-M780SL is a great MW/LW/FM performer. SW propagation has been mediocre and suffers from the RF hash QRN, so difficult to test.
Amazing, Peter! It’s hard for me to believe the reception you had of WFED (Federal News Radio). I listen to that station every time I go through the DC/Baltimore area and I think your reception is just as good. A TA crossing of almost 5,000 km with armchair copy! Quite an accomplishment!
Thank you for sharing your Gran Canaria DX with us. I’m pretty impressed with the Sony ICF-M780SL as well.
Post Readers: make sure you check out Peter’s YouTube channel by clicking here.
Click here to search Amazon.co.uk and click here to search eBay for the Sony ICF-M780SL.
Image source: NOAA
(Source: Wired via David Korchin)
SOME RETIREES TAKE up fly fishing. Others pick up golf. But when Roland—or “F5ZV,” as he’s known on ham radio—left his job in Belfort, France a decade ago, he devoted his newfound leisure to a far more peculiar hobby: hunting radiosondes.
The white plastic boxes contain instruments to measure things like wind, temperature and humidity; meteorologists send them skywards on balloons, and they transmit data back over radio waves. But somewhere around 100,000 feet, the balloons burst, and the radiosondes parachute back to earth.
Roland began using a radio receiver and antenna to track them to the rooftops, parking lots, and random cow pastures where they land. “He was completely obsessed with radiosondes,” says Swiss photographer Vincent Levrat, who documents the chase in his quirky series Catch Me If You Can. “He would wake up at night just to hunt.”
By Roland’s own estimation, there are hundreds of other radiosonde hunters across Europe who monitor launch schedules for weather station balloons. They begin each hunt by using software called Balloon Track to predict the general area where a radiosonde might land; Balloon Track calculates the trajectory based on wind speed and burst altitude.[…]
Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor, Charlie Liberto (W4MEC) for the following guest post:
by Charlie Liberto (W4MEC)
You probably know what a log book is, and maybe a logarithm, but do you know what a ‘Logging Scale’ was meant for? If you are a modern SWL’er, and have a receiver built in the last 40 years or so, you probably don’t have that mysterious 0 to 100 range on your dial, as shown at the top of the picture of the Hallicrafters S20-R main dial, and you may not have a dial at all, peering without question at a digital display of your received frequency.
The Logging Scale on older and vintage receivers had two functions: to let you find a station you might be looking for, when you knew the frequency it would be on, and to determine the frequency of a station, but you had to have known references. How to do that on those old scales that may have had 50 kHz or even 500 kHz hash marks between whole Megahertz numbers, or in that era, KC or MC numbers? The process is fairly straight forward, but did require you to know the operating frequency of at least 2 stations on the band of interest, and the closer they were to the mystery frequency, the better.
Let’s say you are looking for WLMN that is supposed to begin its operation day on 6025 kHz. and your receiver has a mark every 250 kHz between 5 and 7 MHz, that’s pretty iffy as to setting the dial. Now, you know that station WABC is on 5500 kHz, and station GXYZ is on 6525 kHz, so, tuning in WABC you note what number the pointer on the dial is over on the logging scale, maybe it is 40. Then you tune to GXYZ and you find it on 70 on the logging scale. The known difference in frequency between WABC at 5500 kHz and GXYZ at 6525 is 1025 kHz, and the logging scale number difference is 40 to 70 or 30 divisions. Take the 1025 kHz separating your two known stations, divided by the 30 logging scale divisions and you get 34.167 kHz per division. Some more math, the station you are looking for, WLMN is on 6025 kHz, which is 525 kHz away from WABC at 5500 kHz., divide 525 kHz by the logging scale frequency versus division number of 34.167 kHz which equals approximately 16. Take that 16, add it to WABC logging scale number of 40, and you should expect to hear WLMN on logging scale 56 on the dial.
Of course you can flip this process around. If you heard WLMN, but did not know it’s frequency, the same procedure worked backwards to interpolate the logging scale 56 into kHz, added to the WABC frequency/log number, or subtracted from GXYZ numbers, and you would figure out WLMN was on 6025 kHz.
What did this process do? It ‘calibrated’ your receiver dial to known checkpoints by using known frequencies of stations, such that you had a better idea of where you were frequency wise, but it did have it’s limitations. Older receiver dials usually had the lower frequencies divisions of a band close together, and as you tuned to higher frequencies on the same band, hash marks for frequencies got farther apart, while the logging scale stayed linear. This was because builders used the simpler straight line capacitance variable capacitor for tuning, instead of the straightline wavelength or straight line frequency style which would have made the dial more linear. If you used two stations on the low end to set a logging scale reference, chances are it will be quite a bit off in the frequency versus logging scale number on the high end of the dial. So, if you could find two stations that bracketed the one you were examining, that would assure the most accuracy.
After all that, you are probably saying thank God and a lot of engineers for a digital readout.
Thank you, Charlie, for an excellent tutorial and example of using dial logging. I’ve had a number of vintage radios over the years with logging scales and it took some digging to discover how they worked. While digital radios make the process as easy as pie, vintage radios are worth the extra effort!