By Jock Elliott, KB2GOM
Just yesterday morning, I was reminded that sometimes really small things can make a significant difference SWLing. So here are some things that I found can make an improvement, particularly if you are using one of the modern shortwave portables with its whip antenna.
- Turn off as many electronics as possible in the room where you are listening. Computers, scanners, LED lights and all sorts of other electronics can introduce digital “hash” into the airwave near your radio. Turning them off may reduce the noise floor. Remember, we are all about improving signal-to-noise: we want more signal, less noise. Yesterday, I was trying to chase some English language broadcasts and found that turning off a nearby police scanner made a significant difference. If weather permits, moving outside can make a huge difference.
- Feel free to move the whip antenna of your radio to different orientations such as horizontal and various points of the compass. Again, yesterday I was unable to hear one particular station with the whip antenna vertical, but when I lowered it to nearly horizontal and pointed toward the south, the station was audible.
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- If you are just getting started, try using the search/scan/seek function of your radio to see what broadcasts it detects. Remember, though, that the seek function will reveal only what it can detect, so you might also try it with your antenna in different orientations. (See number 2 above.)
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- Try using a bigger antenna. If you radio came with an auxiliary roll-up antenna, try deploying it. One of my auxiliary antennas is designed so that the far end can be clipped to a curtain. Try different configurations and see which works best. If you radio didn’t come with one, it is easy to improvise: get yourself 20 feet of insulated wire and an alligator clip. Attach the clip to the wire, then clamp the jaws of the alligator clip to the whip antenna on your radio. Try different configurations. The only hard and fast rule is: never, EVER, deploy an antenna where it can fall on a power line or a power line can fall on it. And, if you deploy your antenna outside be sure to haul it in when lightning threatens. Don’t go nuts with the length of the wire . . . 20 feet will do. Carlos Latuff, whose radiofax and weatherfax interceptions often grace this blog, often uses a wire antenna that is just 3 meters long!
- It is very useful to have a list of target frequencies, particularly since so many modern portables have a keypad that makes punching in a frequency as easy as using a calculator. I can highly recommend the charts produced by Harold Sellers of the Ontario DX Association. These include the World English Survey (a listing of English language broadcasts by time and frequency), Target Listening by Country, and Target Listening by Time. Just because a station is listed at a particular time on a particular frequency doesn’t mean that you will be able to hear it, but I find it fun to punch in the numbers and discover what I can You can be notified when each month’s charts can be downloaded. They are posted to the ODXA Facebook Group files section and also on three IO Group files section: ODXA, World of Radio and CIDX.
I hope these small suggestions will be of some help in making your listening better.
