Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor Jeff McMahon, who notes that he’s published a new post on his blog, The Herculodge.
This time, Jeff examines the Tecsun PL-880 vs. PL-660, exposing the quirks and realities of DSP-based radios in his interference-heavy household. Jeff finds that in real-world conditions, the trusty PL-660 often outperforms the PL-880—especially when battling household RFI.
Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor Jeff McMahon, who notes that he’s recently published a short review of the Tecsun PL-880 on his blog, The Herculodge.
Jeff has discovered something that portable radio enthusiasts have known for more than a decade: the PL-880 sports some of the best audio fidelity in a modern portable radio!
His review prompted me to search for my original review of the PL-880. It turns out I published it in December 2013. Has it really been over 11 years since the PL-880 was introduced? It’s hard to believe—but I’ll admit it still holds its own. I’ll never let mine go.
Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor, Dennis Dura, who shares the following promotion at MTC. He notes that there may be an additional coupon code can also be applied.
Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor, Jock Elliott, who shares the following guest post:
By Jock Elliott, KB2GOM
A search for “shortwave listening antennas” on the internet landed me on the page for the Par EndFedz® EF-SWL receive antenna, which is a 45-foot end-fed wire antenna connected to a wideband 9:1 transformer wound on a “binocular core” inside a UV-resistant box. A link on the page invited me to check out the eHam reviews of this antenna, which are here. What struck me is that there are just page after page of 5 star reviews of this antenna. Hams and SWLs apparently just love it. (If you want to buy of these antennas, they are now sold by Vibroplex and can be found here.)
As I reached for my credit card, I remember that I had an LDG 9:1 unun transformer lying around and some wire left over from the Horizontal Room Loop project. Maybe I could create my own end-fed SWL antenna by wrapping the wire around the perimeter of the room, attaching it to the 9:1 unun and then by coax to the back of my Grundig Satellit 800.
So I did exactly that. The wire for new end-fed antenna travels the same route around the perimeter of the room as the horizontal room loop. The main differences between the two antennas are that the end-fed is not a loop, and it terminates in the 9:1 transformer, which, in turn, feeds the Satellit though a coax cable. But in essence, we’re talking about two indoor wire antennas that are the same length and laid out along the same path about 7 feet in the air around the interior of the 8-foot by 12-foot room that serves as a library and radio shack: the horizontal room loop and the indoor end-fed.
The Satellit 800 has three possible antenna inputs: the very tall built-in whip antenna, two clips on the back of the 800 where the horizontal room loop attaches, and a pl-239 coax connector where the new end-fed antenna attaches. In addition, there is a three-position switch that allows me to quickly switch from one antenna to another.
Tuning up on the WWV time stations on 5, 10, 15, and 20 MHz and sliding the switch on the back of the Satellit 800 among the three different positions, I quickly found that the whip antenna was the noisiest of the three choices and offered the poorest signal-to-noise ratio. The comparison between the horizontal room loop and the indoor end-fed antenna was very, very close. While the horizontal room loop was quieter, it seemed to me that the signal offered by the indoor end-fed antenna was the tiniest bit easier to hear, so I decided to leave the Satellit 800 hooked up to the indoor end-fed antenna.
Then I did something I had wanted to do for quite a while: I disconnected the horizontal room loop from the back of the Satellit 800 and attached one end of the wire to the indoor end-fed. So now, I had a roughly 100-foot end-fed antenna wrapped twice around the room.
Before we proceed any further, you need to understand this: my comprehension of antenna theory is essentially nil. As the old-timers would have it: you could take the entirety of what I understand about antenna theory, put it in a thimble, and it would rattle like a BB in a boxcar.
Ever since the successful creation of the horizontal room loop, I had wondered: if 50 feet of wire wrapped around a room improves the signal, would 100-feet of wire improve the signal even more? Inquiries to several knowledgeable people produced the same result: they didn’t think so.
Guess what? They were right . . . entirely and completely right. Tuning to the time stations and attaching and detaching the extra 50 feet of wire from the indoor end-fed, I saw (on the signal strength meter) and heard no difference in signal strength or signal-to-noise ratio.
So now, the Satellit 800 is attached to the indoor end-fed antenna, and there is an extra 50 feet wire wrapped around the room on the same path as the end-fed. Wouldn’t it be nice if I could find a way to hook that extra wire up to my Tecsun PL-880?
An old auxiliary wind-up wire antenna from a FreePlay radio came to the rescue. It was an annoying piece of gear; the wire was difficult to deploy and even more difficult to wind up again, and it had languished in a drawer for more than a decade. But it had a really nifty clip on the end that was designed to easily snap on and off a whip antenna.
Pulling an arm-spread of wire out of the reel, I cut it off, stripped the wire, attached it to the end of what had been the horizontal room loop, and clipped it to the whip on the PL-880. Tah-dah . . . instant improvement to the signal coming into the PL-880.
Some time ago, a reader had asked whether I found the Satellit 800 a little deaf in comparison to the Tecsun PL-880. Now, with two indoor antennas of approximately the same length and routed along the same path, I could do the comparison on shortwave frequencies. Starting with the time stations and later with hams in single-sideband on the 20-meter band, I alternated between the two radios. Although the PL-880 has more bandwidth choices, and the two radios have a slightly different sound to them (probably, I’m guessing, due to differences in their circuitry), the bottom line is this: anything I could hear with the Satellit 800 I could also hear with the PL-800 . . . and vice versa. (Note: I did not do any comparison between the two on medium wave or FM.)
In my not-so-humble opinion, both offer worthy performance that is improved with the addition of a 50-foot wire antenna, even if it is indoors.
And that brings us to the final point.
If you decide to add a bit of wire to improve the signal coming into your shortwave portable or desktop receiver, do NOT, under any circumstances, EVER deploy the wire where it could come into contact with a powerline or fall onto a power line or where a power line could fall on it.
As Frank P. Hughes, VE3DQB, neatly put it in his wonderful little book Limited Space Shortwave Antenna Solutions: “Make sure no part of any antenna, its support or guy wires can touch a power line before, after, or during construction. This is a matter of life and death!”
And when thunder and lightning threaten, make sure your outdoor antenna is disconnected and grounded.
Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor, Bill Hemphill, who shares the following guest post:
YouLoop Antenna Funby Billy Hemphill WD9EQD
Like many listeners, I live in an antenna restricted community. While I have strung up some hidden outdoor wire antennas, I have found that they didn’t really perform that much better than just using the telescoping antenna with maybe a length of wire attached. The biggest problem (whether indoor or outdoor antenna) has been the high noise floor.
A few months ago I bought an AirSpy HF+ Discovery SDR receiver. I had already owned a couple of SDRPlay SDR receivers, but the high noise floor limited their performance. I had read good reviews about the AirSpy, especially its performance on the AM Broadcast band and the lower shortwave bands.
I have about 80 feet of speaker wire strung from the second floor and across the high windows in the living room. This does perform fairly well, but the high noise floor still exists.
A couple of weeks ago, I bought the YouLoop Magnetic Loop antenna from AirSpy. I gave it a try and am amazed at the lower noise floor compared to the indoor wire antenna.
AirSpy with Wire Antenna
AirSpy with YouLoop
AirSpy with Wire Antenna
AirSpy with YouLoop
AirSpy with Wire Antenna
AirSpy with YouLoop
Dramatic reduction in the noise floor. I’ve done a lot of playing around with it and find that the YouLoop picks up just about the same stations as the indoor wire antenna does. But with the lower noise level, the YouLoop makes it more enjoyable to listen. Overall, the YouLoop is now my main antenna.
It works so well with the AirSpy, I started wondering if I could use it with a portable radio, like the Tecsun PL-880. But the AirSpy website has the following note:
Note: It is very likely your third party radio will not be sensitive enough to operate with the YouLoop properly. We have even seen self-documented failed attempts to build pre-amplifiers to compensate for the lack of sensitivity and/or the required dynamic range in third party radios. Use your brain, and eventually an Airspy HF+ Discovery.
Doesn’t sound like it will work with portable radios. BUT, I’m always one to try anyway.
Tecsun PL-880
Since the YouLoop has a SMA connector, I bought a SMA to 1/8” phone jack cable. Plugged it into the PL-880 antenna jack and found I had almost a dead radio. Very few stations heard. But in playing around, I accidentally touched the phone plug to the telescoping antenna and instantly got strong signals.
I did some very unscientific tests. I attached the YouLoop through the side antenna jack, did an ATS scan, then did the same with the YouLoop clipped to the telescoping antenna. Also did a scan with just the telescoping antenna fully extended.. I got some very interesting results. These were done one after the other, so there can be differences in signal fading, etc.
I have repeated the above test several times at different hours. While the actual number of ATS stations varied, the ratio between them remained fairly consistent to the above numbers.
From the above, it appears that the telescoping antenna circuit is more sensitive than the 1/8” antenna jack circuit. Maybe some attenuation is being added to the 1/8” jack since it’s more likely a higher gain antenna would be used there. Can anyone confirm that the circuit indeed attenuates thru the antenna jack?
The YouLoop seems to be a decent performer when directly clipped to the telescoping antenna. While not as good as a high gain outdoor antenna would be, it definitely is usable for indoor uses.
I also tested it clipped to the antennas of some other portable receivers. Tecsun S-8800, PL-330, Panasonic RF-2200 and Philco T-9 Trans-World receivers. All showed an increase over just using the telescoping antenna.
Some interesting notes:
The Tecsun PL-330 saw the same reduction in signal when directly plugged into the antenna jack as opposed to clipping on the telescoping antenna.
The Tecsun S-8800 did not show that much of a drop. I basically got the same number of stations when clipped to antenna as when I connected to the BNC jack:
In conclusion, I find that I can use the YouLoop with my portable radios to increase the signals on strong stations when used indoors. And it is quite the performer when used with the AirSpy HF+ Discovery SDR receiver. It easily portable and I find that I move it around the house as I need to. I just hang it off a window curtain rod. I may just order a second one so that my family room radio has one permanently attached to it.
Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor, Jerome van der Linden, who writes:
Hello Thomas,
I have managed to break three of these flimsy PL-880 back stands, and thought, “how hard can it be to make one out of metal?”
These two photos are the result from a piece of aluminium that I had in the shed (yes I know you guys call it aluminum) . Here’s hoping it lasts longer!
I love it, Jerome. I’m willing to bet your backs tand will outlast the PL-880 now!
Thanks for sharing. I love this simple aluminium (remember, I lived in Europe–ha ha) solution! 
Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor, Jock Elliott, who shares the following guest post:
by Jock Elliott, KB2GOM
Okay, okay, I’ll admit it: I’m an oldster, currently enjoying well over 70 trips around that Big Orange Ball in the sky. Further, I’ve been out of SWLing for a while.
Coming back into the hobby after more than a decade’s absence, has been eye-opening. Back when I wrote for Passport To World Band Radio, my main interest, equipment-wise, was tabletop communications receivers hooked to serious outdoor antennas.
Today, however, tabletop communications receivers are hard to come by (there are few new offerings), and, in my situation, serious outdoor antennas present a series of logistical problems that aren’t going to get solved quickly.
So that has brought me to today’s crop of portable shortwave receivers, and – bottom line – they are pretty darn cool, offering worthy performance on a number of levels. My latest acquisition is the Tecsun PL-880.
Like many of the current SW portables, it offers a system for scanning the SW bands and automatically storing the stations it finds into memory. On the PL-880, it’s called ATS (for Auto Tuning Storage.) Oh, you knew that. Yeah, but did you know that the PL-880 has, essentially, two ATS systems?
The down arrow activates ATS Mode A, and the up arrow activates ATS Mode B.
Check it out: If you press the DOWN arrow button (in the SW-METER BAND rectangle), the ATS Mode A system searches the band you are in (FM, MW/LW or SW, including ALL the SW meter bands), automatically stores stations it finds, and “previously stored radio stations will be replaced automatically by the newly found stations.” Each band has its own set of memories, so that SW stations will be stored in SW memories, FM stations will be stored in FM memories, and so forth.
ATS Mode B, however, behaves differently. You can activate it by pressing the UP arrow (in the SW-METER BAND rectangle). If you are in SW frequencies, ATS Mode B will search and store stations only within the current SW meter band. Further, it will NOT overwrite memories, but will start storing stations it finds, starting with the first available unused memory. Pretty neat.
You can, however, fool yourself. I ran ATS Mode A on SW frequencies one night and found a station that was broadcasting unusual stuff (Kennedy assassination, UFOs, and the like). A couple of nights later, I wanted to see what the night’s topic was on that station, so I punched the button to access memories and found . . . nothing! Oh, no, it’s broken!
Then I realized I was in SSB mode, and, it turns out, the PL-880 has a separate set of memories for SSB. (And the manual says that explicitly.) I switched off the SSB mode, and – tah-dah! – the SW memories reappeared. Sometimes it really does pay handsome dividends to read the manual.
One of the slick things about the PL-880’s memory setup is that, when you are in memory mode for a particular band, you can easily scroll through the memories simply by turning the tuning knob.
Wire antenna reels come in different styles. PL-880 (left) and CCrane Skywave SSB. But both improve performance for their respective radios.
The PL-880 has a nice long whip antenna (nearly twice as long as the CCrane Skywave SSB’s antenna), and it seems to be quite sensitive operating off the whip. But if you take the time to deploy the external wire antenna that comes with the PL-880, there is a considerable gain in sensitivity. Tuning around the 40-meter ham band, with the external wire antenna plugged into its socket, I could hear two stations in conversation, one louder than the other, but both copyable. When I tried to listen to the same pair of stations with just the PL-880’s whip antenna, the fainter station disappeared entirely, and the louder station was “down in the mud” but copyable. So the external wire antenna is clearly worth using.
So far, I am well pleased with the PL-880.
PS: Here’s a link to a really good article on extending the wire length of the reel-up antenna that came with the PL-880: https://www.hamuniverse.com/shortwavereelantenna.html