We now have a price for the Tecsun S-8800.
Anna at Anon-Co has notified me that they’ve published the listing for the new Tecsun S-8800. The price is $268.00 US with free shipping to the USA. She also noted that the S-8800 won’t actually be available until some time next week.
Note that my Tecsun S-8800 review is in final draft. It’s one of the longest reviews I’ve written. I will post it within a few days. Follow the tag Tecsun S-8800 for updates.
Hurricane Irma is currently a Category 5 storm with maximum sustained winds at 185 mph. (Image: NOAA.gov)
(Source: WRMI on Facebook)
Hurricane Irma:
Thank you to all of our listeners who have inquired about our hurricane plans. At the moment (early Wednesday local time), it appears that the eye of Hurricane Irma will come right over or very close to Okeechobee by Sunday or Monday.
We will stay on the air as long as possible and as long as it’s safe. Our transmitter building is quite prepared to withstand most hurricanes, and our antennas have survived many hurricanes in the past with little damage.
However, electrical power generally goes out during or after most strong hurricanes, and our generator will only power our lights, computers and air conditioning. Unfortunately we don’t have enough generator power to operate 14 x 100-kilowatt transmitters. So if the power goes out, we are off the air.
We may have enough power to maintain one frequency on the air even during a power outage, and it looks like this will probably be 9455 kHz.
At the moment, our Internet is down, but we hope it will be back up soon, although it could go out again later. We’ll keep you informed as best we can. Thanks again for your interest.
The current hurricane model does show Irma heading straight toward Okeechobee:
Here’s wishing WRMI the very best weathering this monster of a storm. Let’s also hope any SWLing Post readers in the path of Irma make it through without any problems.
(Source: Voice of Vietnam)
US listener: “Personal connection makes me want to listen to VOV”
(VOVWORLD) – The Voice of Vietnam (VOV) turns 72 this Thursday. Over the past 7 decades, VOV has served as a bridge linking Vietnam with people all around the world. Paul Walker, an American radio presenter and a loyal listener of VOV, says it is the personal connection that makes him want to listen to VOV and learn about Vietnam.
After a 6-hour drive from Washington we reached a small town in Pennsylvania near the border with Canada. It was a peaceful, quiet place with houses dating back more than 100 years. Paul Walker, a young radio presenter, met us in front of his house with his radio gears already set up.
With a small table and chair, 2 antennas, an analogue receiver, a tuner, and a digital recorder, Paul finds it interesting to listen to foreign radio programs. Paul said he picked up an obsession with radio when he was a kid and this passion has grown year by year. Now he is doing radio for a living.
“I started listening to the radio as a real young kid. In fact listening to the radio is what made me want to get into radio. I listened to that growing up and now I get paid to play music. I wanted to do it as a kid and that’s what I do now for a living. I’m actually a radio presenter here in the United States, play music on the radio, put together commercials, manage FB pages for radio stations and general stuff like that,” Paul said.
Paul started to listen to VOV in the summer of 2015 and since then VOV has become an indispensable part of his listening schedule.
Paul said he listens and sends in reception reports to VOV quite often with every detail he recorded with his radio equipment: “I like the music, especially when they play the older music. I also like to listen to news because I like the different perspectives, different opinion on it because other countries see things differently than we do and I like to hear that. I like the Letterbox program that is one of my favorites, I like to hear how other listeners tune into VOV and what they like about it and it seems like a fairly large amount of people like the music so I know there’re many of us out there. VOV’s English announcers are very friendly”[…]
Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor, Ivan Cholakov (NO2CW) who shares the following:
I finally got around to listening through some of the amateur radio band spectrum captures from the 2017 Solar Eclipse QSO party. I used an SDRPlay receiver with an end fed LNR antenna in portable field setting in Nashville, TN.
About 30 minutes of solar eclipse contacts and chatter:
Click here to view on YouTube.
Thank you, Ivan, for taking the time to put this video together and sharing it. The RSP did a fantastic job capturing this spectrum–I do love the SDRuno application for reviewing spectrum recordings as well. Cheers!
Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor, Andy Howlett, who writes:
Some while back I spotted an elderly ‘TW Communivator’ in use the a late episode of The Avengers TV series. The episode in question is called ‘All done with Mirrors’.
Studio Canal are a bit touchy about people nicking stills from their videos, but I sent my screen-grab to the website ‘TW Radio’ which is a site dedicated to Tom Withers and his products. The owner got permission for a one-off reproduction.
You can see the photo by going to http://www.twradio.uk/page98.html
Thanks, Andy! The Avengers is one of my favorite action/adventure TV shows of the 1960s. Lately, I’ve been waiting for a used DVD box set of the series to appear at a local retailer. The fact that I’ve always had a crush on Diana Rigg (a.k.a. Emma Peel) has nothing to do with this. 🙂
Check out other radios spotted in film and TV series by clicking here.
Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor, Ed, who shares an update to his previous post regarding Fast Radio Bursts. Ed writes:
Here’s a followup article explaining, “Five Reasons Why The Signals From Stephen Hawking’s Breakthrough Initiative Aren’t Aliens”.
It compares the power of these Fast Radio Bursts (FRB’s) with that of the mediumwave array in Roumoules, France (the most powerful radio broadcast facility in the world) which is reportedly nineteen orders of magnitude *weaker* than these FRB signals. Wow!
It also mentions the novel Canadian CHIME radio telescope under construction [above], which will have the most gain of any in the world.
Thanks, Ed! Yeah, while I would certainly love to hear that the SETI program has identified broadcasts from other intelligent beings, the likelihood is that any candidate signal(s) are explainable in many other ways. Still, what’s so great about the SETI program is they doggedly pursue the search, pour over the data, scrutinize the results, draw conclusions then continue the search.
A map of the United States showing the path of totality for the August 21, 2017 total solar eclipse. (Source: NASA)
Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor, Bob LaRose (W6ACU), for the following guest post:
by Bob LaRose (W6ACU)
DXers know that the reception of overseas Shortwave Broadcast stations offers one of the best ways to immediately gauge shortwave radio propagation conditions from your location to distant areas of the world. For the eclipse of 2017 I decided to see how reception of SW broadcast stations on lower shortwave broadcast frequencies (and to a smaller extent medium wave AM) reacted to the short term effects of the eclipse.
Going into this experiment I suspected that since the eclipse should temporarily reduce ionization to D-layer of the ionosphere, there might be some reduction in corresponding typical D-layer daytime absorption on lower frequencies. The hope was that this would enhance lower frequency propagation, particularly on the path between Asia and Western North America, which is normally totally absorbed at that time of day. I also monitored for propagation on other HF stations such as WWV as well as US-based SW Broadcast Stations in Alaska and Tennessee, and to a lesser extent AM MW broadcast stations. Here are the results of my experiment.
EQUIPMENT:
The Icom -IC-7300
For these tests I was using an ICOM IC-7300 Transceiver as a receiver connected to my standard antenna for lower frequency use – a Carolina Windom with the center about twenty feet off the ground. The antenna works reasonably well over a wide frequency range, including the lower SW and the medium wave AM broadcast bands. Because of my high local electrical noise level and proximity to several local AM broadcast transmitters, I turned off the built-in RF amplifier of the IC-7300 for all the tests. I used the uncalibrated S Meter of the radio to measure relative signal strengths in S units and dB above S-9.
BASELINE TESTS
The day before the eclipse I took baseline measurements at about the time of the eclipse. Because of normal summer daylight absorption, there were no signals present on either the 49 or 41 meter SW broadcast bands. At this time of year signals on those two bands generally fade below the local noise level at my QTH San Diego by about 1500 UTC.
I also checked the reliable daily beacons on SW at that time are the WWV frequencies of 5 and 10 MHz, The baseline for WWV was a signal strength of S5 on 5 MHz and S7-9 on 10Mhz.
I also took some baseline measurements of AM broadcast stations in Los Angeles (KFI 640 and KNX 1070). I was not able to receive any of the San Francisco, Sacramento, Las Vegas stations or points further North.
THE DAY OF THE ECLIPSE
According the Internet sources the eclipse began in San Diego at 1607 UTC, peaked at 1723 UTC and ended at 1846 UTC. It reached 66% of totality.
My first observation was at 1550 UTC. The strength of all signals were at the nominal readings from the day before. At 1630 I still did not hear any SW broadcast stations above the local noise level.
By 1640 the HF broadcast stations had begun to break through the noise. Here is a chart of my reception observations during the observation period:
| Freq KHz | Station and Location | Time in UTC vs. Relative Signal Strength (S Units) | |||||||||
| 1550 | 1630 | 1640 | 1650 | 1710 | 1725 | 1745 | 1800 | 1815 | 1830 | ||
| 640 | KFI Los Angeles | 9 | 9 | 9 | 9 | 9 | 9 | 9 | 9 | 9 | 9 |
| 1530 | KFBK Sacramento, CA | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 3 | 6 | 2 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 5000 | WWV Ft Collins, CO | 5 | 5 | 7 | 9 | 9 | 9 | 6-7 | 7 | 5 | 5 |
| 5845 | BBC Singapore (ends at 1700) | 0 | 0 | 0 | 9 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 5995 | Korea – Echo of Hope (presumed) | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 6 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 6015 | Korea (presumed) | 0 | 0 | 0 | 5 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 6045 | Korea (presumed) | 0 | 0 | 0 | 6 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 6125 | China National radio | 0 | 0 | 0 | 6 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 6155 | Taiwan (1700-1730) | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | S9+10 | 5-7 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 6165 | Yamata Japan for Korea (1600-1700) | 0 | 0 | 6 | 7-9 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 6175 | China National Radio | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 5-7 | 7-9 | 7-9 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 6195 | BBC Singapore (open carrier – presumed tune-up for next morning | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | S9+10-20 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 7300 | Radio Taiwan | 0 | 0 | 7 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 7385 | China National Radio | 0 | 0 | 9 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 7465 | BBC Singapore (ends at 1700) | 0 | 0 | S7-8 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 7485 | VOA Thailand (started 1700) | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 7-8 | 3 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 7540 | VOA Thailand (started at 1700) | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | S5-7 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 9355 | Radio Free Asia (Marianas Islds, starts at 1700) | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 5-7 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 9475 | WTWW Lebanon, TN | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 7-9 | 7 | 4-6 | 0 |
| 9655 | KLNS Anchor Point, AK | 0 | 0 | 9 | 6-7 | 7-8 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 9965 | Radio Free Asia (Marianas Islds, starts at 1700) | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 9 | 5-7 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 9980 | WWCR Nashville, TN | 8 | 7-9 | 7-8 | 7-8 | 7-8 | 7-8 | 7-8 | 9 | 7-9 | 7-8 |
| 10000 | WWV Ft Collins, CO | 7 | S9+10 | 9 | 9 | 9 | 5-7 | 9 | 9 | 6-8 | 7-9 |
| 12160 | WWCR Nashville, TN | S9+20 | S9+10 | S9+10 | N/R | N/R | N/R | N/R | S9+10 | S9+20 | N/R |
N/R = Not recorded
REVIEW OF RESULTS
As the results show, there was a very significant improvement in lower frequency shortwave propagation between San Diego and Asia during the eclipse. The 49 and 41 meter SW broadcast bands in particular went from below the noise level to providing good reception of a number of Asian and Pacific broadcast stations, starting at around 1640 UTC. Stations were received from China, Korea, Mariana islands, Taiwan, and Singapore. All stations fell back below the noise level by 1745UTC.
Reception of WWV Ft Collins, CO on 5 MHz also greatly improved around 1700 UTC. The 10 MHz signal was not significantly affected.
As the eclipse moved East, Reception of WTWW on 9475 kHz and WWCR on 9980 kHz from Tennessee peaked at around 1745 UTC. There was no major effect to the WWCR transmission on 12160 kHz.
On mediumwave AM the only long distance station that I could hear was KFBK Sacramento,1530kHz. The distance is roughly 475 miles. It went from below the noise to an S-6 at peak at 1725 UTC. (Note – I tried the clear channel stations in the Bay Area, Portland, Boise, etc. but none of them were heard. Many of these frequencies have either low power daytime stations or are right next to high power local stations here in Southern California). Reception of KFI 640 kHz Los Angeles (about 90 miles) was unchanged with no sign of typical nighttime selective fading.
This was an interesting once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for this propagation experiment and the results show that the eclipse conditions can significantly improve certain types of radio propagation over long distances!
Fascinating results! Thank you so much for sharing your report of shortwave radio propagation during the 2017 Solar Eclipse, Bob!
