Radiwow offers deep discounts for R-108 unbiased reviews

17 Replies

Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor, The Professor, who notes that Radiwow is offering free and half-price units to consumers willing to review their R-108 receiver. All of the details are on the Radiwow R-108 product page at AliExpress.

Here’s a copy of the statement:

Dear friends

Are you still struggling to find a cost-effective radio? Now the FREE opportunity is coming!

Recently ,our store have launched a RADIWOW® R-108 Radio which has great sound quality, selectivity and sensitivity .R-108 Radio is a good world receiver with great FM Stereo/LW/SW/MW /AIR/DSP. It will start selling on January 30, 2019.You deserve it!

We are looking for 20 people from Japan, the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, Spain, Italy, France to test and write an unbiased and honest review for our latest radio.

In addition, we need friends from Spain, Italy, France to help us translate R-108 English user manual into Spanish, Italian and French.

In all top three users who apply for the test will enjoy the radio for free, and the 3-20 will enjoy it at half price. Please indicate in the subject when contacting us: your country; product model; leave review or translate user manual.

Click here to read this statement on the Radiwow R-108 product page.

Please comment if you’ve successfully ordered a unit under this program. I’m currently evaluating the R-108 here at SWLing Post HQ.

Do you enjoy the SWLing Post?

Please consider supporting us via Patreon or our Coffee Fund!

Your support makes articles like this one possible. Thank you!

Spread the radio love

Tivdio V-115: Simple modification to abate internally-generated noise

6 Replies

Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor, Marc Thomas, who shares a link to this site which describes modifications to eliminate the Tivdio V-115’s internal noise.

In a nutshell, the author made two small mods:

Decouple the power/battery with an electrolytic capacitor of around 10uF soldered to the battery connector inside the radio (see photo above)
The author also grounded the speaker, but didn’t test to see if this alone had any positive impact

I could not find contact details for the author of this mod, so I hope they don’t mind the fact I shared it here on the SWLing Post.

Note that the Tivdio V-115 is also known as the Audiomax SRW-710S and Kaimeda SRW-710S (and likely rebadged as a number of other models).

Click here to read reviews of this radio.

Retailers:

Spread the radio love

Bedside radio: Jeff ousts the Sangean WR-2 in favor of the Grundig G4000A

1 Reply

(Source: The Herculodge)

Our friend, Jeff McMahon, over at the Herculodge blog has just replaced his bedside radio–he writes:

Inexplicably, the Sangean WR-2 wasn’t getting 89.3 KPCC without static, distortion, and bleed-in from another station, over the last few weeks, even with the wire FM antenna attached to the back of it. Who knows why FM reception is subject to variation. It could be the weather.

In any event, I put the Sangean WR-2 in my daughter’s room (she gets her pop station MyFM 104.3 very easily, with the pigtail antenna on the back) and put the 13-year-old Grundig G4000A by my bedside. With the telescopic FM antenna alone, KPCC has a weak signal, evidenced by the Grundig’s reception meter, but when I put the wire SW antenna to the side SW antenna port, the reception is strong and clear.

Over the years, I’ve had many portables, including the Degen 1103, and some old Tecsun models from about 10 years ago. They all suffered from weak tin speakers. Not so with the Grundig G4000A. The speaker sound is very pleasing.[…]

Continue reading at the Herculodge.

Spread the radio love

Building a Raspberry Pi magnetometer network

1 Reply

Source: Ciarán D. Beggan and Steve R. Marple

(Source: Southgate ARC)

Ciarán Beggan of the British Geological Survey describes how a network of 9 Raspberry Pi magnetometers were deployed to schools around the UK to measure geomagnetic storms

As computers such as the Raspberry Pi and geophysical sensors have become smaller and cheaper it is now possible to build a reasonably sensitive system which can detect and record the changes of the magnetic field caused by the Northern Lights (aurora).

Though not as accurate as a scientific level instrument, the Raspberry Pi magnetometer costs around 1/100th the price (about £180 at 2019 prices) for around 1/100th the accuracy (~1.5 nanoTesla). However, this is sufficient to make interesting scientific measurements.

During 2017, a network of 9 Raspberry Pi magnetometers were deployed to schools around the UK from Benbecula to Norwich. On September 8, 2017 a large geomagnetic storm was captured by the school magnetometers. Using these data and the array of other magnetometers around the North Sea, we were able to recreate the spatial and temporal changes of the magnetic field during the storm in great detail. The two phases of the storm show the westward (night time) and eastward (daytime) flow of the auroral electrojet currents in the ionosphere.

Source http://www.mist.ac.uk/nuggets

Download the paper Building a Raspberry Pi school magnetometer network in the UK
https://www.geosci-commun.net/1/25/2018/gc-1-25-2018.pdf

Click here to read at the Southgate ARC.

Spread the radio love

WRTH 2019: Now at Book Depository

Using bus service to ship heavy vintage radios

4 Replies

Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor, James Branch, who shares the following comment regarding the shipment of heavy vintage radios:

On the issue of shipping Boat Anchors, I’ve had good experiences using Greyhound Package Express, Tough-bin structural foam footlockers and proper padding.

The parcel is loaded at the bus station of origin and usually remains on that bus to its destination without having to survive a sorting center or multiple unhappy loading personnel.

It may be inconvenient to drop off and pick up at the bus terminal, but considering the irreplaceable nature of these rigs, it’s worth the effort.

http://www.shipgreyhound.com/e/pages/Home.aspx

I had no idea! Thank you for the tip, James!

Spread the radio love

The NSA’s Software Defined Radio application “RedHawk” is now open source

6 Replies

Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor, Andrew, who writes:

Not kidding, a friend told me that NSA released a bunch of software to open source, the main list being here:

https://code.nsa.gov/

While looking at the list of projects on that page, halfway down the page, I found a project called “RedHawk” which is described as:

“A software-defined radio (SDR) framework designed to support the development, deployment, and management of real-time software radio applications.”

Now, being curious I opened the github link:

https://github.com/redhawksdr

[It] contains quite a number of subprojects, modules and other stuff, then I checked the main “RedHawk” project:

https://github.com/RedhawkSDR/redhawk

Here’s the documentation:

https://redhawksdr.github.io/Documentation/index.html

It seems really interesting; apparently it allows to define a wealth of processing stages (e.g. filters, converters…) and connect them to process signals coming from an SDR; I think it may be a very interesting and useful tool to fiddle/experiment with SDR receivers, if I’m not wrong it may allow to push an SDR to the limits, improving its performance, and may also be useful to write SDR software!

Fascinating! Thank you for the tip, Andrew!

Post Readers: It appears this project has been in the public domain for a little while. Please comment if you’ve tried implementing RedHawk in your SDR system!