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I recently re-acquired a Yaesu FT-817ND general coverage QRP transceiver. I wrote a post with some info about this radio and how it came into my possession over at QRPer.com, if you’re interested.
My question here: Have any folks in the SWLing Post community ever used the FT-817 or FT-818 series transceivers for serious shortwave broadcast listening?
I originally owned a first production run FT-817 back in 2000 when I lived in the UK. I did quite a bit of SWLing with it then, but I never compared it with other radios. I do recall feeling it was a very capable general coverage transceiver, though, and remember logging a number of broadcasters (although I can’t seem to find those logs these days). Of course, propagation was quite a bit better back then, too!
Please comment if you use or have used the FT-817/818 for shortwave listening!
This deep image from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory shows the Vela pulsar, a neutron star that was formed when a massive star collapsed. (Source: NASA)
Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor, Roger, who writes:
Hello Thomas,
I thought you, along with some others in the SWLing community, might be interested in the musical renditions, or sonifications, that were released 9/22/2020 by NASA’s Chandra X-ray
Many thanks, Roger for sharing this! Below, I’ve copied one excerpt with one pulsar sound. I’d encourage you to check out the others by clicking here.
Listen to a Pulsar Clock
Turning a pulsar’s rotational data into sound makes it easier to observe patterns and make comparisons between different nebulous pulsar rotational speeds. as a pulsar ages it spins at a slower speed. listen to the different pulsar heartbeats. what can you guess about how fast these different pulsars rotate? Which pulsar is the oldest? How about the youngest?
Neutron stars are strange and fascinating objects. They represent an extreme state of matter that physicists are eager to know more about. Yet, even if you could visit one, you would be well-advised to turn down the offer.
The intense gravitational field would pull your spacecraft to pieces before it reached the surface. The magnetic fields around neutron stars are also extremely strong. Magnetic forces squeeze the atoms into the shape of cigars. Even if your spacecraft prudently stayed a few thousand miles above the surface neutron star so as to avoid the problems of intense gravitational and magnetic fields, you would still face another potentially fatal hazard.
If the neutron star is rotating rapidly, as most young neutron stars are, the strong magnetic fields combined with rapid rotation create an awesome generator that can produce electric potential differences of quadrillions of volts. Such voltages, which are 30 million times greater than those of lightning bolts, create deadly blizzards of high-energy particles.
These high-energy particles produce beams of radiation from radio through gamma-ray energies. Like a rotating lighthouse beam, the radiation can be observed as a pulsing source of radiation, or pulsar. Pulsars were first observed by radio astronomers in 1967. The pulsar in the Crab Nebula, one of the youngest and most energetic pulsars known, has been observed to pulse in almost every wavelength—radio, optical, X-ray, and gamma-ray.
Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor, Kris Partridge, who writes:
Last night I sent the link to the SWLing Droitwch item to a former colleague. He replied this morning, reply below, and includes a couple of useful links. I’m very sure the SWLing Post knows about MB21.
Thinking that maybe the item on Crowbourgh will be of interest to SWLing readers. It contains the ‘magic’ word “Aspidistra” ! Lot of SW history there.
Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor, Pawel Kita, who writes:
Good morning Thomas.
I bought a Tecsun PL-330 firmware 3303.
Do you remember when I once reported a bug in one of the versions of the
Tecsun PL-880 radio? This error was later named as “fine tuning TECSUN reversed bug”
The same error occurs in the following Tecsun radios: PL-365 and PL-330
firmware version 3303.
Thank you for the tip, Pawel. That is an odd and slightly obscure bug that Tecsun obviously has yet to address.
Radio Waves: Stories Making Waves in the World of Radio
Because I keep my ear to the waves, as well as receive many tips from others who do the same, I find myself privy to radio-related stories that might interest SWLing Post readers. To that end: Welcome to the SWLing Post’sRadio Waves, a collection of links to interesting stories making waves in the world of radio. Enjoy!
Many thanks to SWLing Post contributors Todd R, Skip Arey and Tracy Wood for the following tips:
Playing Bollywood soundtracks and songs about safety shoes, this shopfloor station made stars out of Dale Winton and Nicky Horne, and paved the way for UK commercial radio
nless you spent your summers packing Jaffa Cakes into boxes in the 70s, you are unlikely to have heard of the United Biscuits Network (UBN). It was a radio station for biscuit-makers, broadcasting around the clock to factories in London, Manchester, Liverpool and Glasgow. One part industrial psychology, another part community radio, UBN was intended to make factory life more bearable, but over its nine-year lifespan, it emerged as one of the most daring, anarchic and pioneering stations to hit the UK airwaves.
Music has long been a point of contention in the workplace. Prof Marek Korczynski, who co-authored Rhythms of Labour (2013), describes the history of British working life as “a battle over soundscapes”. Bosses first wanted silent factories, but during the second world war, Korczynski says, “industrial psychologists – the forerunners to HR departments – started looking at playing cheerful music in factories, at the times of day when productivity would dip”. After the war, as Britain rebuilt itself, this strategy was maintained with muzak: inoffensive background tunes, played to lighten the monotony of factory work.
There was one issue, according to Korczynski: “Workers grew to hate muzak.” As jobs on the production line were deskilled and made ever more monotonous, muzak’s effectiveness weakened and staff turnover soared. For Sir Hector Laing, the chairman of United Biscuits in the 1960s, stemming the flow – and its cost – was desperately necessary. Drawing on the success of commercial pirate stations such as Radio Caroline, Laing put adverts in Melody Maker, bought state-of-the-art broadcasting equipment and set up his very own station from UB’s headquarters in Osterley, west London (where Sky’s HQ sits today).[…]
When the four orange and white steel towers first soared over Bethesda in 1941, they stood in a field surrounded by sparse suburbs emerging just north of where the Capital Beltway didn’t yet exist. Reaching 400 feet, they beamed the voices of WMAL 630 AM talk radio across the nation’s capital for 77 years.[…]
LITTLE CURRENT – Great Lakes Country 103 FM and Hits100 FM have opened a new broadcasting studio and office space at the Flat Rock Entertainment Centre, home of Manitoulin Countryfest and Rockin’ the Rock, becoming the first off-grid commercial radio stations in Canada, according to CEO Craig Timmermans.
“It’s super nice to not have an electricity bill anymore,” says Mr. Timmermans as he leads The Expositor on a tour through his company’s new headquarters at 1 Radio Road on the southeastern edge of Little Current.
Through the front doors of the building lies a reception area floating in the centre of a large, open rectangular space. All of the central furniture is moveable so the team can empty the space for special events and small live concerts.
To the right is a small seating area featuring a wood and epoxy tabletop made by Kelly ‘KT’ Timmermans, president of the company. She has also built the live-edge wooden shelving and a table inside the adjacent boardroom.
“This is what I did with my quarantine,” she says with a laugh. “It’s nice to have our own space and to be in charge of our own destiny. We loved being downtown but it didn’t help our business like we had hoped.”[…]
02 November 2020: Telecom Egypt and St Helena Government (SHG) have signed an agreement to connect the Island to Telecom Egypt’s subsea system over the Equiano submarine cable system.
Telecom Egypt will be the first to provide St Helena with a fibre optic connection to the rest of the world, which is a crucial step towards the Island’s economic growth. The cable, along with the associated high-speed internet, is planned to be delivered to the Island by early 2022.
The branch that connects Telecom Egypt’s system to St Helena will be 1,140km long. The cable itself will run from the West Coast of Africa and provide St Helena with access to both Lisbon, Portugal and Melkbosstrand, South Africa with scalable connectivity ranging from a few hundred gigabits up to multiple terabits, as demand varies. It, therefore, provides the most cost effective solution to the growth in the Island’s bandwidth needs.
In light of its vast experience in the subsea connectivity business, Telecom Egypt, in conjunction with SHG, will provide a Dynamic Circuit Network functionality, which will ensure that SHG’s communication partners have access to fixed bandwidth.?Telecom Egypt will also support SHG in the design, installation, and configuration of the submarine and network equipment.[…]
Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor, Dave Porter, who writes:
This picture [above] has just emerged, photographer unknown but most likely a rigger from the top of one of the 700′ masts there!
This was taken at Droitwich sometime after colour photography came in (late 1960’s) and before 1986 when the four wire Tee was replaced by a new design developed by BBC Antenna Engineer Tony Preedy, G3LNP that improved upon the 11-j85 Ohms driving point impedance giving a few more ohms and less capacitive reactance for the 2 x 250kW B6042 transmitters and a greater radiation efficiency.
Tony’s present LF array does not look so symmetrical as it comprises four separate Tee wires with the drops as a square box rather than the centre-joined drops of this one.
Tony also developed a low profile Tee antenna over 3 x 17m wooden telegraph poles for MF at up to 1 kW that was used when planning restrictions were enforced. Efficiencies were up to 40% at the 1500 kHz end of the band. However, if used by birds as an overnight roost it could provoke VSWR trips on solid state transmitters, the fix was to use a sliding reduced power detector that wound down the power to a level that did not trip the VSWR monitoring. Old tube transmitters were not affected!
The operating frequency for this LF Tee was 200 kHz at that time, now the antenna is on 198 kHz
Wow–thank you, Dave, for sharing this photo. We truly appreciate your impressive knowledge of UK broadcasting and history! And, wow! The views those riggers took in!
Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor, Matt Blaze (WB2SRI), who shares the following guest post:
Matt’s Marathon MediumWave Matchup
by Matt Blaze
Here’s another simultaneous receiver comparison, this time of ten portable medium wave receivers plus the Icom IC-R9500 (as a “reference receiver”). Previously, I used the same antenna for all the comparisons, but since these are portable receivers, I wanted to compare their performance using their built-in antennas. I did two comparisons, both of moderate to weak signals, one in the evening of a DX signal and the other in the daytime of a regional station.
The receivers were the Potomac Instruments FIM-41 (a “field intensity meter”), the Panasonic RF-2200, the Nordmende GlobeTraveler Exec (a beautiful German SW portable from 1968), the Sony ICF-EX5MK2, the CCrane Radio 2E, the Sangean ATS-909X, the Sangean D4W, the new Tecsun PL-990X, the XHDATA D-808, and finally the CountyComm GP5-SSB, plus the Icom IC-R9500.
All the receivers were recorded simultaneously. The radios (except the Icom R9500) were on the roof of my building and oriented for best reception (signal/noise) and kept sufficiently away from each other and other metal objects to avoid interference, The R9500 was in the shack and used a Wellbrook loop on the roof, also oriented for best signal/noise. I took the audio from the Line Out if one was available and from the headphone jack (via a “direct box” level converter) if not. I tried to match the audio levels reasonably closely, but different ACG characteristics made it difficult to be completely consistent across all the receivers throughout the sessions.
As in previous comparisons, for each session I’ve got a narrated stereo mix with the R9500 on the left channel and each receiver, for a minute or so one after the other on the right channel. You definitely want to use headphones to listen to these so you easily tell the left from the right radio. I’ve also provided mono “solo” recordings of each receiver for the full 15 minute-ish sessions so you can hear a receiver you’re interested in in detail.
Sound Devices 688 Multitrack Recorder
The recordings were made with a Sound Devices 688 recorder/mixer (which can record 12 simultaneous channels of audio). The portable radios were hardwired to the recorder, and the 9500 (which was downstairs) was connected via a Lectrosonics digital radio link. (Everything except the R9500 was on battery power to avoid mutual interference and ground loops, etc). The narration used a Coles noise canceling ribbon mic. Everything was done in a single take per session – there was NO postproduction editing – so I apologize for a few glitches and awkward moments.
You can see a “class photo” of the setup below, although the position and orientation of the radios was different during the actual recordings.
KCJJ
The first recording was at night, where we tuned to 1630 KCJJ in Iowa City, IA. This is effectively a 1KW clear channel; other than a few TIS stations, there’s not much else there on the east coast, and the signal is reliably weak to moderate but readable here on the east coast.
Narrated L/R stereo comparison:
Individual solo tracks:
CCrane Radio 2E
Sangean D4W
XHDATA D-808
Sony ICF-EX5MK2
Potomac Instruments FIM-41
CountyComm GP5-SSB
Nordmende GlobeTraveler Exec
Tecsun PL-990X
Icom IC-R9500
Panasonic RF-2200
Sangean ATS-909X
WSVA
The next recording was made during the day, of WSVA, a regional station in Harrisonburg, VA running 5KW in the daytime. Their signal is also reliably weak-moderate but readable here.
Narrated L/R stereo comparison:
Individual solo tracks (receiver should be obvious from the file name):
CCrane Radio 2E
Sangean D4W
XHDATA D-808
Sony ICF-EX5MK2
Potomac Instruments FIM-41
CountyComm GP5-SSB
Nordmende GlobeTraveler Exec
Tecsun PL-990X
Icom IC-R9500
Panasonic RF-2200
Sangean ATS-909X
Hope your readers find it useful!
-matt
An absolutely amazing job again, Matt! Thank you so much for taking the time to put this comparison together and sharing it here on the SWLing Post.
