Once again, SWLing Post readers did an amazing job of capturing off-air clips of the BBC Midwinter broadcast to Antarctica! Thank you so much for submitting your recordings!
I managed to listen to a bit of the broadcast myself in the parking lot of the US Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama. I only brought my C. Crane CC Skywave SSB along. The signal was quite weak, but I did log the 9,890 kHz broadcast from Woofferton, UK. Pretty impressive considering the modest portable receiver and the fact the broadcast’s target was Antarctica! Pure shortwave magic.
Here’s a very short video:
Click here to view on YouTube.
I hope to have a formatted post with all reader recordings published next week. It’ll actually take me a few dedicated hours to put it all together, so I appreciate your patience.
These are very busy days for me, so if you’ve contacted me via email, I apologize for taking so long to reply. So far in the month of June, I’ve only been home perhaps a total of three nights. July will be equally as busy, plus I’ll also present at the Circle of HOPE 2018 conference in NYC. Really looking forward to that!
If you missed the Midwinter broadcast, Richard Langley has already posted recordings on the Shortwave Radio Audio Archive [thanks, Richard!].
Again, thank you all for such an amazing job! I’m looking forward to going through the recordings!
I would say your C. Crane CC Skywave SSB acquitted itself quite well considering you were only using its 21-in. telescopic whip. Based on just listening to your 36-sec clip, I would rate your signal weak to fair.
For purposes of comparison, I was monitoring the same broadcast on the same frequency (9850 kHz) about 425 miles N of your location.
My receiver was a Tecsun PL-880 connected to a Sangean (ANT-60) 7-m wire antenna.
I would rate my signal weak to fairly good, just slightly better than yours, with a significant amount of QRN and a fair amount of QSB.
The weather at my receiving site was moderately heavy rain with thunder storms in the (tri-state) region. Since I saw some patches of blue sky in your video clip I would say your weather was better than mine.
Still, all in all, I agree it was pretty impressive for both of us – especially when you consider that the transmitting site (Woofferton) was targeting Antarctica and not Northern Alabama or SW Ohio.
Cheers