Caversham Park (Photo source: BBC)
(Source: BBC World Service via Julie M)
For 75 years the BBC ran a monitoring service based in an English stately home. Its job was to listen to foreign broadcasts from all around the world. But in 2018 the BBC decided the building was no longer needed. David Sillito spoke to veterans of the monitoring service before Caversham closed its doors.
A number of SWLing Post readers have been asking about the status of the Titus II portable DRM/SDR radio. I’ve been checking the project website, but had not seen an update in a long time, so I contacted the company. Mike, with PantronX, kindly replied with the following update:
As you might be aware, we have joined up with Fraunhofer to include their MMPlayer app standard on Titus–what a difference a professional decoder, for both analog, DRM(+), and DAB(+), makes! MMPlayer is full featured even including reliable one way file downloads with DRM.
We are attempting also to license HD to include on the app for North America, making a truly worldwide receiver. Some deficiencies in our version of Android have caused issues as well as MMPlayer. All of which have caused delays leading to some serious business decisions – as you can imagine. You are correct that broadcasters have made large orders that will be fulfilled first. There are units in the field testing and such and continuing resolution of the software issues.
One of the issues that folks seem to have a hard time understanding is that we can not just build a few hundred or even thousands of units. Our minimum run is 10,000pcs! To do that everything has to be 100% – including the software. We simply will not ship units that are not 100%. Titus works, MMPlayer works – its that last 5% that takes the most time to resolve. These facts preclude any incremental production attempts. All that being said, we are very hopeful that the first production run is ready by last quarter of this year.
Thank you for the update, Mike!
Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor, Mehdi Asgari (DF2HF / NM9A), who shares photos from the 2018 Friedrichshafen ham radio convention flea market. Be sure to also check out photos we posted yesterday of Friedrichshafen vendors. Thank you, Mehdi!
by Mehdi Asgari (DF2HF)
Mehdi is a software engineer and SDR lover working in Berlin. He’s a licensed ham (DF2HF & NM9A) and also a member of EP2C club.
Many thanks to a number of SWLing Post contributors who’ve shared a link to this excellent article by Denny Sanders in Radio World Magazine about the history of the Zenith Transoceanic:
Zenith Trans-Oceanic Radio in War and Peace
This iconic portable receiver was known for durability and quality
They say necessity is the mother of invention. Nothing proves this more than the story of how the iconic Zenith Trans-Oceanic portable radio receiver came into existence.
Commander Eugene McDonald (1886–1958), the founder of Zenith Radio, was a stickler for quality and insisted that any Zenith product represented cutting edge technology and design integrity.
He was also an accomplished yachtsman. During his many ocean voyages, he constantly was frustrated with the inability of any portable commercial radio set to perform reliably at sea. In about 1939, he ordered the Zenith R&D department to come up with a rock-solid, portable AM receiver sensitive enough to pull in signals from great distances. He insisted that the radio be a multi-band unit including shortwave, marine and aircraft bands.
The Zenith crew came up with a gem: the Trans-Oceanic, a gorgeous piece of engineering housed in a robust and dramatic cabinet designed by the brilliant Zenith industrial designer Robert Davol Budlong.[…]
Continue reading the full article at Radio World Magazine online.
Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor, Mehdi Asgari (DF2HF / NM9A), who shares photos from the Friedrichshafen ham radio convention this year. Tomorrow, we’ll post his photos of the flea market area!
by Mehdi Asgari (DF2HF)
Mehdi is a software engineer and SDR lover working in Berlin. He’s a licensed ham (DF2HF & NM9A) and also a member of EP2C club.
In reply to our post about the Bonito MegaDipole MD300DX wideband active dipole antenna, SWLing Post contributor, Mark, comments:
Dennis from Bonito kindly sent me a sample megadipol and I’m truly impressed with it. The SNR is amazing right through the shortwave spectrum and really helps pull out weak signals.
I was particularly impressed to be able to pick up World Music radio on 5840 kHz all the way here in Ireland with just 100 watts in the evenings.
It’s also quite excellent on LW/MW.
See for yourself on my KiwiSRR just check out the SNR !!!
Click here to load Mark’s KiwiSDR in a new web page.
Thanks, Mark, for hooking the MegaDipole up to your live KiwiSDR!
The Eton/Grundig Field BT
Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor, Marty, who writes:
Hi Thomas…just an fyi that the price of the Eton Field AM/FM/Shortwave Radio w/RDS and Bluetooth has dropped to $84.51 shipped on Amazon. I grabbed one hoping it’ll be a “poor man’s” S-8800. Like you say that price could go up at any time…it is Amazon after all. You might want to post this soon.
Click here to view on Amazon.com (affiliate link).
Thanks, Marty! I think you’ll be quite happy with the Field BT’s performance. Troy made an excellent post comparing it with the Tecsun S-8800 last year. He and I met to compare the two units and I was pretty impressed with it. It has its quirks (mainly with tuning), but the audio is amazing and sensitivity is impressive.