Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor, Dennis Dura, for sharing the following article from Hackaday: Radio Apocalypse: Meteor Burst Communications
This piece explores Meteor Burst Communications (MBC)—a method of bouncing radio signals off ionized meteor trails to enable long-distance communication without relying on satellites or infrastructure. Used historically in military systems, MBC remains a compelling option for resilient, beyond-line-of-sight communication—even in grid-down scenarios.
Welcome to the SWLing Post’s Radio Waves, a collection of links to interesting stories making waves in the world of radio. Enjoy!
Since September 2020, ABC Radio has been quietly trialing DRM technology in Victoria
The public-service Australian Broadcasting Corp. and its transmission contractor BAI Communications Transmission Network hosted a public demonstration of Digital Radio Mondiale broadcasts on June 29, 2022. ABC highlighted the use of DRM on both AM and FM in Wagaratta, Victoria.
According to the DRM Consortium, the demonstration was the culmination of almost two years of COVID-impacted work to assess the performance of DRM services in Australia’s VHF and medium-wave bands.
Previously, the Australian Amateur Radio Experimenters Group reported that AREG member Steve Adler (VK5SFA) had been monitoring “a very un-publicized Digital Radio Mondiale (DRM) trial” on 747 kHz from Wangaratta in August 2021.
The Australian Communications and Media Authority provided ABC with a license variation to conduct the DRM 30 trials from September 1, 2020, to August 31, 2022.
At the public demonstration, senior representatives from the public, commercial and community radio sectors, along with regulators and other interested parties, were able to hear and see the capabilities of DRM broadcasting on AM from Dockers Plains and on FM from Mount Baranduda. They were also able to review the transmission equipment at Wagaratta.[Continue reading…]
Also check out the DRM Consortium’s article on this same topic.
The James Webb Space Telescope probably needs no introduction, since it is perhaps the most important and well-known mission of the last years. It was launched on Christmas day from Kourou, French Guiana, into a direct transfer orbit to the Sun-Earth L2 Lagrange point. JWST uses S-band at 2270.5 MHz to transmit telemetry. The science data will be transmitted in K-band at 25.9 GHz, with a rate of up to 28 Mbps.
After launch, the first groundstation to pick the S-band signal from JWST was the 10 m antenna from the Italian Space Agency in Malindi, Kenya. This groundstation commanded the telemetry rate to increase from 1 kbps to 4 kbps. After this, the spacecraft’s footprint continued moving to the east, and it was tracked for a few hours by the DSN in Canberra. One of the things that Canberra did was to increase the telemetry rate to 40 kbps, which apparently is the maximum to be used in the mission.
As JWST moved away from Earth, its footprint started moving west. After Canberra, the spacecraft was tracked by Madrid. Edgar Kaiser DF2MZ, Iban Cardona EB3FRN and other amateur observers in Europe received the S-band telemetry signal. When Iban started receiving the signal, it was again using 4 kbps, but some time after, Madrid switched it to 40 kbps.
At 00:50 UTC on December 26, the spacecraft made its first correction burn, which lasted an impressive 65 minutes. Edgar caught this manoeuvre in the Doppler track.
Later on, between 7:30 and 11:30 UTC, I have been receiving the signal with one of the 6.1 metre dishes at Allen Telescope Array. The telemetry rate was 40 kbps and the spacecraft was presumably in lock with Goldstone, though it didn’t appear in DSN now. I will publish the recording in Zenodo as usual, but since the files are rather large I will probably reduce the sample rate, so publishing the files will take some time.
In the rest of this post I give a description of the telemetry of JWST and do a first look at the telemetry data. [Continue reading…]
The average person’s perception of a ham radio operator, assuming they even know what that means, is more than likely some graybeard huddled over the knobs of a war-surplus transmitter in the wee small hours of the morning. It’s a mental image that, admittedly, isn’t entirely off the mark in some cases. But it’s also a gross over-simplification, and a generalization that isn’t doing the hobby any favors when it comes to bringing in new blood.
In reality, a modern ham’s toolkit includes a wide array of technologies that are about as far away from your grandfather’s kit-built rig as could be — and there’s exciting new protocols and tools on the horizon. To ensure a bright future for amateur radio, these technologies need to be nurtured the word needs to be spread about what they can do. Along the way, we’ll also need to push back against stereotypes that can hinder younger operators from signing on.
On the forefront of these efforts is Amateur Radio Digital Communications (ARDC), a private foundation dedicated to supporting amateur radio and digital communication by providing grants to scholarships, educational programs, and promising open source technical projects. For this week’s Hack Chat, ARDC Executive Director Rosy Schechter (KJ7RYV) and Staff Lead John Hays (K7VE) dropped by to talk about the future of radio and digital communications. [Continue reading…]
Radio World reports the Electromagnetic Interference generated by Electric Vehicles is causing some EV automakers to drop AM (medium wave) radio
The article says:
Some EV automakers are dropping AM altogether due to audio quality concerns, but that’s just one piece of the puzzle as radio continues to fight for space on the dash.
“As carmakers increase electric vehicle offerings throughout their lineups, the availability of AM radio to consumers is declining,” said Pooja Nair, communications systems engineer with Xperi Corp., in a Radio World guest commentary. “This is because the effects of electromagnetic interference are more pronounced in EVs than in vehicles with internal-combustion engines.”
In other words, electromagnetic frequencies generated by EV motors occupy the same wavelength as AM radio signals. The competing signals clash, effectively cancelling each other out. As EV motors grow more powerful, AM static tends to increase.
Read the full story at
https://www.radioworld.com/news-and-business/headlines/why-are-some-automakers-ditching-am-radio
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The Yaesu FT-710 AESS
Welcome to the SWLing Post’s Radio Waves, a collection of links to interesting stories making waves in the world of radio. Enjoy!
Many thanks to Eric Jon Magnuson for summarizing these news items for Radio Waves!
Yaesu is introducing a new 100 watt SDR transceiver to their product line: the Yaesu FT-170.
The Yaesu FT-710 will cover 160-6 meters with 100 watts output. There are two other Japanese market versions: the FT-710M and FT-710S which are 50 and 10 watt respectively.
This general coverage rig will feature “AESS”–Yaesu’s ‘Acoustic Enhanced Speaker System’ which “creates the high-fidelity audio output.” Yaesu notes that the FT-710 utilizes, “the advanced digital RF technology introduced in the FTDX101 and FTDX10 series.”
Click here to check out the published features and specifications of the new FT-710.
KYIV, Ukraine — During the early morning hours of Feb. 24, as Russian missiles struck targets across Ukraine in the opening hours of the full-scale war, the Ukrainian military’s Army FM radio station went underground.
The team of seven army officers and about 10 civilian personnel abandoned their studio on the top floor of a downtown Kyiv building and relocated into a nearby basement. Inside the dank and dark underground space, they connected a mixing board and a couple of laptops to a mobile radio system, which the station’s reporters had previously used to report from the Donbas trenches.
“I just grabbed my Kalashnikov and went to work,” said Oleksandr Yurchenko, 32, a Ukrainian army second lieutenant assigned to Army FM.
While a Russian invasion force advanced to the outskirts of Kyiv in the war’s perilous first few days, the Army FM team stayed at their posts and worked in six-hour shifts to keep their programs running 24/7. They constructed makeshift beds from shipping pallets and stocked the basement studio with food and water. Body armor vests and Kalashnikovs occupied all available shelves and empty corners.
From this jury-rigged basement studio, Army FM continued to transmit information and entertainment programs to listeners across Ukraine — including into territories Russian forces invaded and occupied. [Continue reading…]
On Hackaday Chris Lott WD4OLP writes about DL1DN’s aluminum foil 20cm antenna for 28 MHz (10m) operation
David DL1DN, is an Amateur Radio enthusiast with a penchant for low-power (QRP) portable operations. Recently he was out and about, and found that 10 m propagation was wide open. Not discouraged by having forgotten his antenna, he kludges up a makeshift one using a 20 cm length of aluminum foil.
Read the Hackaday story and watch the video at
https://hackaday.com/2022/07/02/aluminum-foil-20-cm-antenna-for-10-m-operation/
Dave Zantow writes:
ATS-25 with Binns 4.1 firmware Review Now Posted. […] There were 7 different versions in the beta stage. New audio file added as well (Sync when it does not work so well, which is NOT all the time). Might be one more update before release (not sure right now).
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Welcome to the SWLing Post’s Radio Waves, a collection of links to interesting stories making waves in the world of radio. Enjoy!
Many thanks to Eric Jon Magnuson for summarizing these news items for Radio Waves!
Every so often, our star fires off a plasma bomb in a random direction. Our best hope the next time Earth is in the crosshairs? Capacitors.
TO A PHOTON, the sun is like a crowded nightclub. It’s 27 million degrees inside and packed with excited bodies—helium atoms fusing, nuclei colliding, positrons sneaking off with neutrinos. When the photon heads for the exit, the journey there will take, on average, 100,000 years. (There’s no quick way to jostle past 10 septillion dancers, even if you do move at the speed of light.) Once at the surface, the photon might set off solo into the night. Or, if it emerges in the wrong place at the wrong time, it might find itself stuck inside a coronal mass ejection, a mob of charged particles with the power to upend civilizations.
The cause of the ruckus is the sun’s magnetic field. Generated by the churning of particles in the core, it originates as a series of orderly north-to-south lines. But different latitudes on the molten star rotate at different rates—36 days at the poles, and only 25 days at the equator. Very quickly, those lines stretch and tangle, forming magnetic knots that can puncture the surface and trap matter beneath them. From afar, the resulting patches appear dark. They’re known as sunspots. Typically, the trapped matter cools, condenses into plasma clouds, and falls back to the surface in a fiery coronal rain. Sometimes, though, the knots untangle spontaneously, violently. The sunspot turns into the muzzle of a gun: Photons flare in every direction, and a slug of magnetized plasma fires outward like a bullet.
The sun has played this game of Russian roulette with the solar system for billions of years, sometimes shooting off several coronal mass ejections in a day. Most come nowhere near Earth. It would take centuries of human observation before someone could stare down the barrel while it happened. At 11:18 am on September 1, 1859, Richard Carrington, a 33-year-old brewery owner and amateur astronomer, was in his private observatory, sketching sunspots—an important but mundane act of record-keeping. That moment, the spots erupted into a blinding beam of light. Carrington sprinted off in search of a witness. When he returned, a minute later, the image had already gone back to normal. Carrington spent that afternoon trying to make sense of the aberration. Had his lens caught a stray reflection? Had an undiscovered comet or planet passed between his telescope and the star? While he stewed, a plasma bomb silently barreled toward Earth at several million miles per hour. [Continue reading at Wired…]
The following article is an original work published by the Information Professionals Association. Opinions expressed by authors are their own, and do not necessarily reflect the views of or endorsement by the Information Professionals Association.
By Tom Kent
As Vladimir Putin tightens his stranglehold on what his citizens see and hear, will radio once again become an effective way to get outside voices into Russia?
For the time being, U.S. broadcasting officials believe the best way to get their content to Russia’s population is still through the internet, despite all of Putin’s attempts to control it. Activists in the United States and Europe, however, are convinced that in a wartime situation, those wanting to reach Russians should be trying everything – including shortwave radio, the mainstay of Cold War broadcasting by the Voice of America (VOA) and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL).
The U.S. government’s reluctance to return to shortwave has led to the odd spectacle of American volunteers taking broadcasting into their own hands. Activists have crowdfunded projects to transmit on shortwave channels programs produced by VOA and RFE/RL that the government declines to broadcast with its own transmitters.
Shortwave broadcasting uses high frequencies that can reach across continents. During Soviet rule, VOA, RFE/RL, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) and other stations used shortwave to punch news, religious programs and forbidden Western music through the Iron Curtain. Soviet jamming stations tried to drown out the broadcasts, but much of the content got through.
With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the rise of the internet in Russia, foreign shortwave broadcasting tapered off. Boris Yeltsin let RFE/RL open local stations in some 30 Russian cities, but under Putin they were forced to close because of Russian laws. The United States then switched its radio and video services for Russians almost entirely to the web and social networks.
Since the war began, however, Russian authorities have increasingly blocked from the internet any content that criticizes the war or Putin’s rule. Many Russians use VPNs and other software to get around the blocks, and have come to the US broadcasters’ websites and social network feeds in droves. But Russian officials are working feverishly to block these circumvention tools, and may be able to determine which citizens are using them. [Continue reading on the IPA website…]
With music consumption having long ago moved to a streaming model in many parts of the world, it sometimes feels as though, just like the rotary telephone dial, kids might not even know what a radio was, let alone own one. But there was a time when broadcasting pop music over the airwaves was a deeply subversive activity for Europeans at least, as the lumbering state monopoly broadcasters were challenged by illegal pirate stations carrying the cutting edge music they had failed to provide. [Ringway Manchester] has the story of one such pirate station which broadcast across the city for a few years in the 1970s, and it’s a fascinating tale indeed.
It takes the form of a series of six videos, the first of which we’ve embedded below the break. The next installment is placed as an embedded link at the end of each video, and it’s worth sitting down for the full set.
The action starts in early 1973 when a group of young radio enthusiast friends, left without access to a station of their taste by Government crackdowns on ship-based pirate stations, decided to try their hand with a land-based alternative. Called Radio Aquarius, it would broadcast on and off both the medium wave (or AM) and the FM broadcast bands over the next couple of years. Its story is one of improvised transmitters powered by car batteries broadcasting from hilltops, woodland, derelict houses, and even a Cold War nuclear bunker, and develops into a cat-and-mouse game between the youths and the local post office agency tasked with policing the spectrum. Finally having been caught once too many times, they disband Radio Aquarius and go on to careers in the radio business.
The tale has some tech, some social history, and plenty of excitement, but the surprise is in how innocent it all seems compared to the much more aggressively commercial pirate stations that would be a feature of later decades. We’d have listened, had we been there!
Not only pirate radio has made it to these pages, we’ve also brought you pirate TV!
Click here to wattch the first installment on YouTube.
Click here to read the full article on Hackaday.
Dave (N9EWO) reports:
Eton dealer “Universal Radio” in Ohio USA is accepting orders as of June 28, 2022 for the Eton Elite Satellit ($ 599.99 + $ 14.95 USA shipping, sorry Universal will NOT ship outside the USA) for late July 2022 delivery. The new Eton Elite Executive HD ($ 249.99 tentative) is now listed for November 2022 release (sorry no pre-orders are being accepted yet).
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Welcome to the SWLing Post’s Radio Waves, a collection of links to interesting stories making waves in the world of radio. Enjoy!
HARARE, Zimbabwe — The unavailability of critical information about community radio in Africa has led the University of the Witwatersrand(Wits) journalism department and a consortium of media, civil rights and business NGOs — Fojo Media Institute, Civicus, Civil Rights Defenders, Defend Defenders and Hub Afrique — to carry out a study entitled “Mapping Community Radio in Sub-Saharan Africa.”
“Even basic information is hard to get, and it is often not even certain how many stations are on air. Operations collapse, and others start, with hardly anybody outside the immediate environment noticing. Even the licensing authorities sometimes struggle to keep accurate records,” revealed Prof. Franz Kruger, head of Wits Journalism.
Conducted by Jacob Ntshangase, the head of Wits Radio Academy, the study sought to gather information and better understand the community radio landscapes in different parts of Sub-Saharan Africa to identify needs, opportunities and potential partners for developing a program of support for community radio on the continent. [Continue reading…]
The 2022 NAB Show is already underway in Las Vegas, and fresh from presenting some new research on HD radio in the US, Xperi SVP Broadcast Radio, Joe D’Angelo (pictured), sat down with radioinfo’s Wayne Stamm.
Joining the conversation was Commercial Radio Australia’s Head of Digital, Jamie Chaux, to add an Australian perspective and view on what might be gained from the HD experience in the States.
radioinfo: We’re talking about a couple of the presentations that are going to be made at NAB this year. Joe you’ve already done one of those presentations and taken a look at some very interesting studies that have been done recently about the penetration of HD radio, especially here in the US.
Joe D’Angelo: Yes, I finished a session today on actually UX guidelines (NABA Radio In-car User Experience) for in-car receiver design and that that went very well. And what’s really exciting about not only the work of the UX group, but the progress of HD radio, is we’re now at 85 million vehicles on the road.
And so we surveyed users of the technology and 91% of them came back and said that HD radio has significantly improved their radio listening experience.
74% of people said they would not buy another new car unless it had HD radio, which is very affirming.
Read more at: https://radioinfo.com.au/news/can-the-hd-radio-experience-be-of-use-in-regional-australia-nabshow/ © RadioInfo Australia
Learning anything new, especially so broad and far reaching as electronics, can be hard. [IMSAI Guy] knows this because he gets asked regularly ‘how do I learn electronics?’ Many of you reading this will have a few ideas to pass along (and we encourage you to share your take on it in the comments below) but there is an even greater number of people who are asking the same question, and [IMSAI Guy]’s take on it is one that this particular Hackaday writer can relate to.
According to [IMSAI Guy], an excellent place to start is the ARRL Handbook. The ARRL Handbook is an electronics and RF engineering guide published by the Amateur Radio Relay League in the US. It’s a wonderful reference, and past editions can be had very inexpensively and are every bit as handy. Many hams will have a copy they could be talked out of, and you can likely find one at your local library. Where to start in the Handbook, then?
[IMSAI Guy] recommend starting with whatever catches your fancy. As an example, he starts with Op Amps, and rather than diving straight into the math of how they work or even worrying to much about what they are- he just builds a circuit and then plays with it to intrinsically understand how it works, a “learn by doing” approach that he has found extremely helpful just as many of us have. We also appreciated is very straightforward approach to the math: Don’t bother with it unless you need to for some reason, and definitely don’t start by learning it first.
Read the full article and watch the video at:
https://hackaday.com/2022/04/25/learning-electronics-by-just-doing-it/
As previously announced, RadCom Editor Elaine Richards, G4LFM is to retire in the summer and there will be a vacancy for a person to edit RadCom, the Society’s journal and one of the most respected amateur radio publications in the world.
The successful candidate will need to show demonstrable experience of producing professional and technical publications in both print and digital formats as they will need to take the entire co-ordinated portfolio forward and exploit new media opportunities.
The role also includes overseeing the publication of RadCom Basics and RadCom Plus with their editors, as well as being part of the team that puts together GB2RS news each week.
The role is being advertised by Redwood Publishing Recruitment and is also on the Guardian Jobs website and LinkedIn. If you’d like an informal chat about the role, please contact the General Manager via gm.dept@rsgb.org.uk
All applications must be made via the Redwood website: https://www.redwoodrecruitment.com
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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’s Radio Waves, a collection of links to interesting stories making waves in the world of radio. Enjoy!
An abiding memory for a teen fascinated by electronics and radio in the 1970s and 1980s is the proliferation of propaganda stations that covered the shortwave spectrum. Some of them were slightly surreal such as Albania’s Radio Tirana which would proudly inform 1980s Western Europe that every village in the country now possessed a telephone, but most stations were the more mainstream ideological gladiating of Voice of America and Radio Moscow.
It’s a long-gone era as the Cold War is a distant memory and citizens East and West get their info from the Internet, but perhaps there’s an echo of those times following the invasion of the Ukraine. With most external news agencies thrown out of Russia and their websites blocked, international broadcasters are launching new shortwave services to get the news through. Owning a shortwave radio in Russia may once again be a subversive activity. Let’s build one! [Continue reading…]
(By Ed Ryan) When was the last time your station gave away a slick looking radio as a promotion (batteries included)? How many more echo dots will radio stations keep giving away before they realize they may be pushing listeners to find something else to listen to?
In a teaser for Edison Research’s upcoming Infinite Dial presentation at Podcast Movement’s Evolutions next week, the research firm reported that the number of Americans who say they do not have a single radio in their home continues to rise.
In the 2020 Infinite Dial, performed before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, just under one-in-three Americans age 12 and older reported not having a single radio in their home, according to Edison. In 2022, that number is now 39%.
Fourteen years ago, only 4% of respondents said they had no radios at home. Continue reading
The uSDX/uSDR QRP transceiver (Chinese version)
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’s Radio Waves, a collection of links to interesting stories making waves in the world of radio. Enjoy!
Talking about this Chinese ham radio transceiver requires a veritable flurry of acronyms: HF, SSB, QRP, and SDR to start with. [Paul] does a nice job of unboxing the rig and checking it out. The radio is a clone of a German project and provides a low-power radio with a rechargeable battery. You can see his video about the gear below.
SSB is an odd choice for low power operation, although we wonder if you couldn’t feed digital data in using a mode like PSK31 that has good performance at low power. There are several variations of the radio available and they cost generally less than $200 — sometimes quite a bit less.
There isn’t much on the front of the radio. There are a few buttons, a rotary encoder, and an LCD along with a speaker and microphone built-in. There are ports for power to run the radio if you want to not use the battery and a separate port for battery charging. There are also ports for a key, external microphone and speakers, and audio connections that look like they’d work for digital modes. According to commenters, the radio doesn’t have an internal charging circuit, so you have to be careful what you plug into the charging port. [Continue reading…]
(SIDE NOTE: I have been testing one of the USDX / USDR transceivers (a Chinese version–not the open source homebrew project) over at QRPer.com and have been very displeased with performance. So much so, I returned it for a refund. One of the biggest issues being spurious emissions that were produced in harmonics, but also the receiver is one of the worst I’ve ever tested. -Thomas) Continue reading