Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor, Rolf Snijder, who writes:
Here are some pictures from my new XHData D-808.
It performs well, only a soft muting when I change the dial.Longwave is not great–it receives, but is too weak. Mediumwave and shortwave look great for this radio.
Have a great new year!
Thank you, Rolf!
I expect to receive my XHDATA D-808 within a week or so. I’m very curious how it will compare with the Digitech AR-1780!
From the Isle of Music, January 7-13:
This week our special guest is rumbero/percussionist extraordinaire Jesús María Abreu Hernández of Los Papines, who will share some of their exciting new release Rumbeando a mi manera. We will also converse about the history of the group. Plus, a taste of Los Hermanos Arango, one of the most interesting Rumba/Jazz/Fusion groups in Cuba today
Four opportunities to listen on shortwave:
1. For Eastern Europe but audible well beyond the target area in most of the Eastern Hemisphere (including parts of East Asia and Oceania) with 100Kw, Sunday 1500-1600 UTC on SpaceLine, 9400 KHz, from Kostinbrod, Bulgaria (1800-1900 MSK)
2. For the Americas and parts of Europe, Tuesday 0100-0200 UTC on WBCQ, 7490 KHz from Monticello, ME, USA (Monday 8-9PM EST in the US). This is running on a backup transmitter due to a recent fire.
3 & 4. For Europe and sometimes beyond, Tuesday 1900-2000 UTC and Saturday 1200-1300 UTC on Channel 292, 6070 KHz from Rohrbach, Germany.
Uncle Bill’s Melting Pot, January 7, 2018
Hot and Cold
Episode 44 of Uncle Bill’s Melting Pot will include some music to warm us up in this cold winter.
Sunday, January 7, 2018
2300-2330 UTC (6:00PM -6:30PM Eastern US) on
WBCQ The Planet 7490 KHz shortwave from the US to the Americas and parts of Europe
Reception reports are especially welcome right now due to WBCQ’s recent transmitter fire.
Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor, Bill (KD5XN), who writes:
I enjoyed your article on the C Crane Skywave SSB this month in the Spectrum Monitor. I too have both of the Skywaves now, and agree they are near-ideal travel radios.
I bought a protective case by “Hermit Shell” that I stumbled across on Amazon that may well be one of the best protective cases I’ve ever seen for a portable radio.
It is made specifically for the Skywave(s) and fits like a glove. I believe one could kick it across a parking lot and never worry about any damage to your radio it’s so well padded. I put the earbuds and a clip lead for attaching to a reel antenna into the pouch in the cover. Not much else is going to fit.
I know that you are also a “bag geek” so I’ve sent the Amazon link for you to peruse.
[…]The only slight negative that I could say is that the cased radio is approximately twice the thickness of the radio alone, if tight packing is an issue.
I just thought I’d pass this along as I don’t recall ever seeing anyone mentioning it. At $14.99 it’s cheap but good insurance if you travel where things “take a beating.”
73, Happy Holidays and thank you for all your reviews and articles.
Click here to view on Amazon.com (affiliate link).
Thank you for your recommendation and tip, Bill!
We actually have mentioned this on the SWLing Post before, but obviously the article is rather buried at this point. Thanks for the reminder.
Like you, I do see the negative that this case effectively increases the size of the CC Skywave for one bag travel, but it would certainly do a fine job protecting the Skywave in transit. Indeed, I believe that’s a pretty acceptable compromise. I especially like the fact that the earbuds will also fit in the case. I might pick one of these up with some Christmas credit I have at Amazon.
Afterall, the CC Skywave SSB is a $150 radio–! I suppose since I buy $15-$20 protective cases for my $150 smartphone, my radio should at least get the same treatment! It’ll certainly outlast my smartphone!
(Source: The Mainichi via Kim Elliott)
HELSINKI (AP) — For nearly three decades, Finland’s YLE radio has broadcast a weekly news program in Latin to a small group of committed listeners around the globe.
With the audience numbering just 10,000 and people increasingly turning to the internet for content, Friday was meant to be the end of the road for “Nuntii Latini,” which means “news in Latin.” But don’t underestimate the passion of Latin aficionados — more than 3,000 of them wrote in from around the globe, some in fluent Latin, encouraging the station to save the program.
YLE leadership listened, agreeing to extend it until at least its 30th anniversary in 2019.
“Ne umquam desperaveris,” (loosely translated: “never give up,”) said co-announcer Reijo Pitkaranta, a docent and lecturer in Latin at the University of Helsinki.[…]
Happy New Year SWLing Post community!
A few months ago, I published a post about Colin Anderton’s excellent Radio Moscow recordings from the late 1970s. Being a space flight enthusiast, all of Colin’s brief off-air recordings feature news from the 1977-1978 Soyuz 26 mission to the Salyut 6 space station.
Recently, I started posting Colin’s recordings on a schedule so that each recording is being published exactly 40 years from the original broadcast date. Check out the Shortwave Radio Audio Archive each day (or subscribe via iTunes) to listen to the recordings.
Below, I’ve embedded the recording from New Year’s Day 1978 where we learned that Yuri Romanenko and Georgi Grechko toasted the New Year with fruit juice (for obvious reasons, champagne was not allowed on the station!).
Photo by Michael Browning on Unsplash.
Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor, Eric McFadden (WD8RIF), who notes that the excellent website, Atlas Obscura, recently featured The Shipping Forecast:
Why a Maritime Forecast Is So Beloved in the United Kingdom
For the penultimate song on their 1994 album Parklife, Blur chose the swirling, meditative epic, “This Is a Low.” The song envisions a five-minute trip around the British Isles as an area of low pressure hits.
“Up the Tyne, Forth, and Cromarty,” sings the lead singer Damon Albarn, “there’s a low in the high Forties.” The song’s litany of playful-sounding place names, including the improbable “Biscay” and “Dogger,” may seem obscure to listeners abroad, but to a British audience, they resonate.
The song’s lyrics were inspired by the Shipping Forecast, a weather report that is broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on behalf of the Maritime and Coastguard Agency. Sailors working around the coasts of Britain and Ireland, recipients of the wrath of the North Atlantic and North Sea, are the ostensible beneficiaries of the forecast.
But, for listeners who tune in while tucked in bed rather than sailing the high seas, the reassuring sound—a simple, steady listing of conditions in the seas around the British Isles, broken down into 31 “sea areas,” most of which are named after nearby geographical features—is something more akin to the beating pulse of the United Kingdom, as familiar as the national anthem or the solemn chimes of Big Ben.[…]
Continue reading the full story via Atlas Obscura.
Thanks for the tip, Eric!
SWLing Post readers know that I’m quite a fan of The Shipping Forecast. We’ve posted a number of articles about the Forecast on the SWLing Post in the past–click here to read through our archives.
When I lived in the UK, I would often fall asleep and/or wake up to the Shipping Forecast. Here in the States, I can listen to the forecast live via the U Twente WebSDR, but I rarely remember to do so.
And, of course, I can navigate to the Radio 4 website and stream current and past forecasts on demand, but I find the audio a little too clean and full fidelity. I prefer listening to my maritime poetry via Amplitude Modulation (AM)!
To satisfy my desire for some AM forecasts, this morning I fed my SSTran AM transmitter with audio from the Radio 4 website, then made a recording with my AirSpy HF+ SDR.
Here’s my AM version of the Shipping Forecast:
Click here to download as an MP3.
For the record: this is what you get when you combine a radio and shipping forecast geek!
The AirSpy HF+ is the new SDR on the block, but how does it compare to the Elad FDM-S2 which is more than 2-1/2 times its $199 price? My main interest is finding out how they compare in a very RF-quiet DXpedition setting, but today I compared the two briefly from my home in Puyallup, Washington (near Seattle).
The receivers were connected via a two-way antenna splitter to the output of a Wellbrook ALA1530S+ loop antenna. I monitored during mid-afternoon local time to ensure that all my MW locals in my suburban location would be at full power, for the best test of the radios’ overload performance. The Wellbrook active antenna is rather “hot” and sometimes overloads receivers during the daytime unless attenuation is added to the signal chain.
I noted there were no truly weak medium wave signals available during the session so comparing sensitivity wasn’t appropriate. However, the band was full of strong daytime MW signals.
It became apparent quickly that the upstart HF+ provides strong competition to the Elad SDR. Clearly, the AirSpy’s trade-off is bandwidth for raw performance at lower cost–approx. 660 kHz alias-free coverage versus about 6 MHz maximum for the Elad.
Using the same center L.O. (local oscillator) frequency, short recordings were made with both receivers on the same receive frequency, same bandwidth, AGC setting, etc. To approximate the 660 kHz coverage of the HF+, I set the FDM-S2 to its 768 kHz sampling rate, the closest available setting to 660 kHz wide coverage.
Here are the results on 1540 kHz, just 10 kHz away from a strong signal on 1550:
AirSpy HF+ – 1540 kHz
Elad FDM-S2 – 1540 kHz
What’s wrong with the above audio picture? The FDM-S2 is clearly overwhelmed by the strong RF on the upper end of the MW band. Visually, the spectrum looked like this with the Elad:
Elad FDM-S2 waterfall/spectrum (1540 kHz)
The noise floor rose by approximately 20 dB due to the overloading. The HF+ showed a normal waterfall and spectrum display while tuning 1540 kHz:
AirSpy HF+ waterfall/spectrum (1540 kHz)
Let’s listen to two more audio clips, this time from 720 kHz which is adjacent to very strong 710 KIRO, the ESPN affiliate in Seattle:
AirSpy HF+ – 720 kHz
Elad FDM-S2 – 720 kHz
This time the difference is subtle, but I think you’ll agree there is a greater amount of “crunchy” background distortion noise on the FDM-S2 recording. I found this to be the case in each instance where I compared receivers on frequencies adjacent to strong locals.
I no longer own a Perseus SDR, but that receiver handles the entire MW band at this location without overload using the same Wellbrook ALA1530S+ loop.
I’d like to emphasize that these were brief, somewhat casual AirSpy HF+ vs. Elad FDM-S2 tests. I expect that in a more forgiving RF environment, both receivers will be equally adept and digging out weak weak and challenging DX signals. I plan to investigate this very scenario in a few weeks at a quiet location on the Oregon coast.
Side note: I have two HF+ units and they can operate concurrently without problems for full medium wave band coverage with HSDSR software, even when both are recording IQ WAV files.
Guy Atkins is a Sr. Graphic Designer for T-Mobile and lives near Seattle, Washington. He’s a regular contributor to the SWLing Post.
