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SoundMonkey posted:Question... does the telescoping antenna on my E5 even do anything for shortwave? A lot of the stuff that low down is aeronautical beacons for direction finding. There is one of them that, for some reason, is in the medium wave broadcast band in the UK. None of the others are still there but this one is. It tends to be quite annoying in the local area, apparently.
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Jun 19, 2007 11:59
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ValhallaSmith posted:Well my softrock lite kit just showed up. I'm waiting for the soldering iron I ordered to arrive now (Metcal SP200). Would anyone like a little walk through on putting these things together?  . I'm already pretty handy with a soldering iron; but a good project post is always a fun read.FauxEDIT: With lots of pretty pictures!
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Jun 19, 2007 15:57
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SoundMonkey posted:I found some CW at 262kHz standing out on the balcony, and after finding a pen and a pad, it appears he was saying "VF" every few seconds, followed by a 5-second steady tone. Automated beacon of some sort? I tried looking at non-directional beacons to see if there was one on 262 kHz but the only match here http://www.airnav.com/navaids/ was for CTM (meaning the signal would just be -.-. - -- over and over) in Chetumal, Mexico. It's in the general range as those sorts of things. No idea, otherwise. It seems doubtful unless you're close to it, although it is broadcast at 1200 watts(!) compared to say the 25 watts for the NDB at my local airport.
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Jun 19, 2007 23:34
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I'm happy to report to all apartment-dwelling E5/G5 users that the Sony AN-LP1 antenna is awesome! I'm finally getting some decent reception, and the small footprint (you suction-cup it to a window) is outstanding. Highly recommended. I got mine off of eBay from a seller in Japan.
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Jun 20, 2007 00:00
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Shastao posted:I tried looking at non-directional beacons to see if there was one on 262 kHz but the only match here http://www.airnav.com/navaids/ was for CTM (meaning the signal would just be -.-. - -- over and over) in Chetumal, Mexico. It's in the general range as those sorts of things. No idea, otherwise. It seems doubtful unless you're close to it, although it is broadcast at 1200 watts(!) compared to say the 25 watts for the NDB at my local airport. The signal was weak and barely audible due to interference - it may not even have been at exactly 262, that was just where the background noise was low enough to hear it. Found one later on that night broadcasting "XX" in code. Which, upon closer inspection (thanks for the link!) was Abbotsford NDB. Which makes sense, since I'm not twenty miles from Abbotsford. Also, to the poster above, how much was that Sony antenna?
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Jun 20, 2007 01:40
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Some of these morse broadcasts could be letter beacons, a bizarre phenomenon thought to be related to Numbers Traffic. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_beacon
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Jun 20, 2007 02:13
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Almost have enough for an E1  I can't wait!
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Jun 20, 2007 02:19
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DarkSol posted:Almost have enough for an E1 Badass! Be sure to provide a thorough review! You getting the straight up E1 or the souped up E1XM?
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Jun 20, 2007 02:24
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AstroZamboni posted:Badass! Be sure to provide a thorough review! Just the straight up E1... I'd rather not pay MORE for XM radio, and then have to pay for a subscription, if that's how it works. I'll try my best to write up a good review. And I'll borrow my friend's digital camera for lots of pictures of it.
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Jun 20, 2007 02:26
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DarkSol posted:Just the straight up E1... I'd rather not pay MORE for XM radio, and then have to pay for a subscription, if that's how it works. Actually, they cost exactly the same, 500 smackers. The E1 XM just gives you the option of adding XM at a later date.
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Jun 20, 2007 02:33
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AstroZamboni posted:Actually, they cost exactly the same, 500 smackers. The E1 XM just gives you the option of adding XM at a later date. Eh... XM really doesn't interest me... So it's just plain ol' vanilla E1 for me.
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Jun 20, 2007 02:50
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So, now that I'm totally a SW addict... I have the wire antenna that came with my E5 (20-30', I'd guess) strung up inside my apartment (pretty much line of sight to my balcony). My main listening problem is insane amounts of interference - if I plug in the external antenna, I get probably twice as much signal, and like six times as much interference. This leads me to believe that my issue is antenna placement. Would out on the balcony be loads better? The best results I've heard so far were with me standing out on the balcony using the telescopic antenna. The only thing is that if I put the antenna on the balcony, I'll probably have to double it back once or twice, my balcony isn't that big. I've also heard a lot more at sunset today than I did yesterday - yesterday may just have been a bad day for whatever reason.
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Jun 20, 2007 04:57
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SoundMonkey posted:This leads me to believe that my issue is antenna placement. Would out on the balcony be loads better? Turn off any other electronics you have, as they might be causing interference. Though I'd try running the antenna outside if you can do it discretely, or nobody cares. Also just thought I'd also say I got Radio Bulgaria in English starting at 2:00 UTC at 9700khz decently well. Though a Asian language station at 9690 was interfering with it a bit tonight. I also picked up Voice of Russia in English quite well on 9860khz at 2:20 UTC, should be an easy QSL for anyone interested.
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Jun 20, 2007 05:20
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SoundMonkey posted:Question... does the telescoping antenna on my E5 even do anything for shortwave? In the LW band, pretty much any CW you hear is going to be an aeronautical NDB (Non-directional beacon). It's basically a high powered am station that gives a pilot a simple relative compass bearing to the direction of the broadcast. There's a database of navaids here, but it doesn't look like there's anything on 262kHz, though it could easily be spillover from a nearby frequency. Edit: that'll teach me not to read... potato of destiny fucked around with this message at 05:32 on Jun 20, 2007 |
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Jun 20, 2007 05:30
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SoundMonkey posted:So, now that I'm totally a SW addict... I don't have convenient access to my balcony, as my radio is in the front of my apartment. What I did is take the wire and run it outside the front window (tuck it into the siding), then completely around the frame, then back inside. I can close the window safely (and I'm gonna leave it closed because it's hot as balls). I have another 60 feet or so spliced onto that, but it's just sitting on the windowsill until I figure out what to do with it. But my reception has been pretty good so far. Halah fucked around with this message at 06:41 on Jun 20, 2007 |
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Jun 20, 2007 06:33
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Dog Case posted:Okay, here's a mini-listening guide of programs I've found easy to hear, taken from Passport to World Band Radio. All times are UTC: You're getting the exact same lineup I am! I've pulled in a few other ones -- got Radio Roma very faintly last night, but that's pretty much what seems to come through on an average day. With a bunch of crazy southern preachers scattered all over the place. I sent reception reports to all of those above today. I think to get anything farther away, I'll have to get a real antenna. SoundMonkey posted:I have the wire antenna that came with my E5 (20-30', I'd guess) strung up inside my apartment (pretty much line of sight to my balcony). My main listening problem is insane amounts of interference - if I plug in the external antenna, I get probably twice as much signal, and like six times as much interference. This leads me to believe that my issue is antenna placement. Would out on the balcony be loads better? The best results I've heard so far were with me standing out on the balcony using the telescopic antenna. The only thing is that if I put the antenna on the balcony, I'll probably have to double it back once or twice, my balcony isn't that big. The wire antenna doesn't do much for me. I've strung it across my balcony, around my windowsill, threw it up a tree, up on my roof...no matter what I do, I'm getting better results with the normal telescoping antenna. Hell, I even rigged up my own wire all over the place, and I'm STILL better off with the E5's pathetic little antenna. I don't know if the E5's built-in is that good, or if I just live in an area where the added interference is too great. I'm still going to get an Eavesdropper and rig it up in my attic, but that project will have to wait until August when my wife is out of town for a week. She'd kill me if she saw me trying to build something up there.
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Jun 20, 2007 06:42
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#shortwave on irc.zirc.org for anyone interested. I'm crashed for the night but thought it might be nice to have a little spot to play some radio.
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Jun 20, 2007 06:45
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StarkRavingMad posted:The wire antenna doesn't do much for me. I've strung it across my balcony, around my windowsill, threw it up a tree, up on my roof...no matter what I do, I'm getting better results with the normal telescoping antenna. Hell, I even rigged up my own wire all over the place, and I'm STILL better off with the E5's pathetic little antenna. I don't know if the E5's built-in is that good, or if I just live in an area where the added interference is too great. I won't disrespect the wire antenna again. I strung it up on my balcony earlier, and while scanning around, I found what I thought was some British guy on 9615kHz. Very clear, like a 4/5, so I thought it was somewhere local. Nope. Radio loving New Zealand, coming in clearer than anything else I've heard in that band. There was some interference, but I could jot enough down to write a plausible QSL... which will be my first .
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Jun 20, 2007 06:51
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E: see below
Halah fucked around with this message at 07:02 on Jun 20, 2007 |
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Jun 20, 2007 06:55
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SoundMonkey posted:I won't disrespect the wire antenna again. I strung it up on my balcony earlier, and while scanning around, I found what I thought was some British guy on 9615kHz. Very clear, like a 4/5, so I thought it was somewhere local. Nope. Radio loving New Zealand, coming in clearer than anything else I've heard in that band. There was some interference, but I could jot enough down to write a plausible QSL... which will be my first
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Jun 20, 2007 06:57
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Halah posted:As nerdy as it sounds, I'm telling you it just might become quite the hobby. Not that I know anything about that, of course. It already has, really. I can't seem to pick up much of anything at all during the daytime, on any band, but at night, I rarely see it scan more than 20kHz before something else pops up. I have yet to hear anything non-standard (so far: preachers, nav beacons, and news broadcasts), but I hope to hear a numbers station or some other cool thing soon.
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Jun 20, 2007 08:02
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SoundMonkey posted:It already has, really. I can't seem to pick up much of anything at all during the daytime, on any band, but at night, I rarely see it scan more than 20kHz before something else pops up. I have yet to hear anything non-standard (so far: preachers, nav beacons, and news broadcasts), but I hope to hear a numbers station or some other cool thing soon. Now you scan and hear silly preachers and news. Yeah, the funny preachers are probably from the US but where is that news coming from? Is it from China? Vietnam? Russia? Part of the game is to see who you can hear. I heard Radio Sweden last night. It's not necessarily about being entertained from commercial to commercial. It's more like 'can I find something from a country/city/station I've never heard before?' Basically it's the ultimate nerd scavenger hunt.
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Jun 20, 2007 08:38
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Halah posted:Daytime sucks. At least until the Sun gets its rear end in gear. Nighttime is where it's at right now. So far, local (CBC), what I believe is BBC, some random station out of WA just below broadcast AM (er, 515kHz I think it was?), and something that I think was in Farsi. I really need to get some kind of logbook, because the cycle of find station - grab laptop - lose station due to laptop isn't all that fun. So far, the only thing I've got an actual positive ID on, and been able to hear and comprehend programming from, was Radio New Zealand.
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Jun 20, 2007 08:43
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AstroZamboni posted:Some of these morse broadcasts could be letter beacons, a bizarre phenomenon thought to be related to Numbers Traffic. I remember some people a while back on the pirate shortwave site that I posted (https://www.frn.net/vines) were talking about beacons they put out in the desert for shits. Because these guys all tend to build their own transmitters they had no problem wiring something like this. They would take photovoltaic cells out of calculators and such, and they would hardwire a frequency and a certain morse code pattern into the circuit board for the transmitter. Basically it would charge a 9V or such battery during the day and at night would broadcast the morse incessantly at a couple hundred mW. The pirates would go out in the desert in the southwest US and drop it off in some remote location, and see how long it would last, use it to test their equipment for low-power DXing, etc. Here's some examples: http://www.spynumbers.com/USSWbeacon.html And here are the most recent loggings from the site if you really want to try and catch these stations. Do I smell possible goon project on the horizon?  I'd love to hear ... .- every time I start DXing...quote:19 March 2007 Milka fucked around with this message at 09:39 on Jun 20, 2007 |
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Jun 20, 2007 09:35
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SoundMonkey posted:It already has, really. I can't seem to pick up much of anything at all during the daytime, on any band, but at night, I rarely see it scan more than 20kHz before something else pops up. I have yet to hear anything non-standard (so far: preachers, nav beacons, and news broadcasts), but I hope to hear a numbers station or some other cool thing soon. The schedule pages on Simon Mason's pages and Spynumbers dot com can really help you know when and where to listen. Links are in the OP.
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Jun 20, 2007 17:13
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Here's a couple more links for listening in the US: http://www.wbcq.com/ This is primarily a rebroadcast station for christian stuff but it seems they have branched out and are now offering a lot of music and talk shows as well. You might find some kooks as well (one of the listed shows is about gold and silver trading). 5110, 7415, 9330, 18910 kHz. http://mt-shortwave.blogspot.com/ A nice blog from Monitoring Times with a lot of new int'l broadcaster schedules posted.
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Jun 20, 2007 20:41
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I have a sweet little Grundig that I found once upon a time. Sometimes I like to take it out at night and tune in. I'm on the coast so I can often get crazy stuff from across the sea. Nothing like a woman chanting madly in Chinese coming in and out of signal with doppler effect to give you the heebie jeebies. I've actually freaked a few folks out with it, just scanning, scanning, then BOOM out of the void "AND THE LORD SPOKETH TO ISHMAEL AND HE DID BURNETH FOR HIS SINS, SINS, SINSkkkksssqqqrkkkkkk- Ni chao pai hoi-skkkkkkk AND HE DID SIN UPON THE EARTH WITH THE FIREYsskkkkkkkk" Shortwave is fun. Sometimes I like to imagine those insane preachers holed up in their dark and musty basements, surrounded by garbage and lit only by a single hanging bulb. He leans over his desk, eyes wild and sweat straining down his brow, dripping onto his battered bible as he barks it's words into the void in the dead of the night...
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Jun 20, 2007 21:01
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Mike B posted:Shortwave is fun. Sometimes I like to imagine those insane preachers holed up in their dark and musty basements, surrounded by garbage and lit only by a single hanging bulb. He leans over his desk, eyes wild and sweat straining down his brow, dripping onto his battered bible as he barks it's words into the void in the dead of the night... Dude...not cool...I try and keep those visuals out of my head. (Yes you're right though)
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Jun 20, 2007 21:04
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blugu64 posted:Dude...not cool...I try and keep those visuals out of my head. (Yes you're right though)
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Jun 20, 2007 21:24
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Mike B posted:I have a sweet little Grundig that I found once upon a time. Sometimes I like to take it out at night and tune in. I'm on the coast so I can often get crazy stuff from across the sea. Nothing like a woman chanting madly in Chinese coming in and out of signal with doppler effect to give you the heebie jeebies. I've actually freaked a few folks out with it, just scanning, scanning, then BOOM out of the void "AND THE LORD SPOKETH TO ISHMAEL AND HE DID BURNETH FOR HIS SINS, SINS, SINSkkkksssqqqrkkkkkk- Ni chao pai hoi-skkkkkkk AND HE DID SIN UPON THE EARTH WITH THE FIREYsskkkkkkkk" I did almost that exact same thing - I'd forgotten I'd left the radio scanning, and it hadn't found anything for a while, then the sun went down and BOOM, crazy preacher out of loving nowhere. Scared me shitless. Also, half the comedy is the commercials on some of these stations - I heard at least four different quack methods for curing cancer advertised last night.
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Jun 20, 2007 21:49
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Another fun thing I've found, once you have been picking through for awhile and found a couple stations, make sure to note down their frequency. Later, go type the frequency into google, or just find a bigass frequency list, try to find the most likely station that was broadcasting based on broadcast times and nearest location to you. It's cool to find out its info like this, but even more cool is if the list has the geographic coordinates for your station, copy those into Google Earth and let her fly. It's pretty neat to see it whip around the world and zoom dead onto a radio tower somewhere. Some are massive arrays, some are just little towers poking out of a cleared circle of jungle. One station I was listening to recently had the coords listed, and it turned out to be somewhere in bumfuck middle of China, right off a tiny little town. The other was from a US Navy base in the Philippines, both with hi-res imagery! edit: going back and reading through the thread I see it's been mentioned and I would just like to reiterate for any goons into the green, sitting out in the night and scanning through the shortwave after a bit of  will probably melt your mind. Beats sitting on your rear end watching TV anytime. Don't freak yourself out though.
The Butcher fucked around with this message at 22:24 on Jun 20, 2007 |
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Jun 20, 2007 22:15
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Mike B posted:Another fun thing I've found, once you have been picking through for awhile and found a couple stations, make sure to note down their frequency. Later, go type the frequency into google, or just find a bigass frequency list, try to find the most likely station that was broadcasting based on broadcast times and nearest location to you. It's cool to find out its info like this, but even more cool is if the list has the geographic coordinates for your station, copy those into Google Earth and let her fly. On Simon Mason's "Shortwave Espionage" Numbers station page (towards the top) there are links to photos on Google Maps of known Number traffic transmitter sites. They were provided by a mysterious individual referred to on the site as "Tristan S." I wonder who that is?  Also, I know a dude who drops A while listening to SW. He has some stories, I tells ya what.
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Jun 20, 2007 23:16
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I shelled out $100 because of this thread on a Grundig S350, and am currently listening to some religious talk show.
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Jun 21, 2007 00:25
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PokeJoe posted:I shelled out $100 because of this thread on a Grundig S350, and am currently listening to some religious talk show. Welcome aboard! I'm absolutely loving stunned at this point how much money I've inadvertantly cased people to part with. I'm very sorry I'm leading so many to financial ruin. On the other hand, we all have cool radios, amirite? Last night I had Atencion (Cuban Numbers) interfering with Dr. Gene Scott. That was absolutely grand, I tell you what!
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Jun 21, 2007 00:40
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I'm on the fence about getting an Icom PC controlled radio, but the lack of Motorola trunking is kind of a bummer especially if I'm gonna shell out the $500-$900 depending on model. I also caught a Spanish number station around 1:30PM EST on my Grundig S350DL on Sunday. It was pretty faint, but I could certainly make out the words. (I'm located in VA)
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Jun 21, 2007 01:43
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You know, it's really hard to find an E1 anywhere on the net. (Amazon has it for $600 which is $100 more than what Eton even says it should be.) I shall continue my hunt for the greater good!
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Jun 21, 2007 04:11
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AstroZamboni posted:I'm absolutely loving stunned at this point how much money I've inadvertantly cased people to part with. I'm very sorry I'm leading so many to financial ruin.
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Jun 21, 2007 05:26
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^^^ - Hell yeah brother! Due to some suggestions here I got a bit excited and got up on my roof this afternoon and ran a bunch of speaker wire around it and back into my room. Anyway, it worked! There is a very noticeable signal boost that I'm pretty happy with. Perhaps now I can actually pick up some quality signals from the comfort of my desk without having to stand outside in the cold swinging the radio in the air to get that signal just right. We shall see when the sun sets tonight. Thanks for the tips!
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Jun 21, 2007 05:28
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DarkSol posted:You know, it's really hard to find an E1 anywhere on the net. (Amazon has it for $600 which is $100 more than what Eton even says it should be.) Weird, I just checked and it was $499. Sharper image stores MIGHT carry them also. Edit: Best Buy also carries them, but they only carry the XM version. http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?skuId=7749859&st=Shortwave&lp=1&type=product&cp=1&id=1140394359129 You might also want to try Universal Radio. They have the E1XM, but they also have the Grundig G1, which is a rebranded E1 with a black exterior casing. It should be available withing a very short time, so you might want to call them and check. AstroZamboni fucked around with this message at 06:22 on Jun 21, 2007 |
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Jun 21, 2007 06:00
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edit: ^^ didn't even see you mention Universal.DarkSol posted:You know, it's really hard to find an E1 anywhere on the net. (Amazon has it for $600 which is $100 more than what Eton even says it should be.) First portable listed at Universal Radio. $499, with a free $80 radio thrown in. edit 2: ok, reading further, this one is the XM model as well. Still a good deal with the YB-550 thrown in, though. nmfree fucked around with this message at 06:22 on Jun 21, 2007 |
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