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I just bought an Eton E5 at Fry's for about 50$ refurbished. So far I've picked up bizarre pinging noises and a couple of talk shows.
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Dec 18, 2007 17:18
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| # ? May 9, 2024 22:49 |
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I've been playing around with radiofax tonight! I installed HamFax and plugged my Grundig YB-400 into my soundcard, and, well: Pretty fun. You can find a schedule for National Weather Service broadcasts here: http://www.weather.gov/om/marine/rfax.pdf
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Dec 20, 2007 04:24
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Well that right there makes me wish I hadn't dropped Ubuntu last week.
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Dec 20, 2007 05:04
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That didn't last long. HamFax crashes with some sort of memory error as soon as I try to receive anything now 
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Dec 20, 2007 16:55
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Here's a freeware Windows radiofax reader I found. I haven't tried it yet, but it installs and starts perfectly on my Vista install. http://www.hffax.de/html/hauptteil_wxsat.htm
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Dec 20, 2007 17:06
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woohoo! Girlfriend got me the 2008 Passport book for Xmas! Also, we lost power last week for about 36 hours in the ice storm out here. I fired up the E5 and had the best reception yet. No static, strong clear signals on freqs where i usually get nothing. I think the power needs to go out more often.
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Dec 21, 2007 16:05
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Shortwave is awesome. I just laid down last night with the lights off, put some earbuds in and fired up my cheap Grundig receiver. It was a little like being plugged into the world itself, listening to the sounds of living humanity across the globe. My reception was poor, but I got more than a few stations from Asia, one or two French, and Radio Netherlands Worldwide came in loud and clear. I liked their in-depth report on political asylum conditions on the EU; it's something I would not have heard about anywhere else. I moved up the dial and got some strange overlay many streams of morse code, which made for some nice tech-ambient noise. Then I tuned in to a Latin station speaking about Caribbean issues, petroleum supply, and the "petro-home" made from PVC and poured concrete. The speaker emphasized that "Venezuela itself" is deploying these homes, but added that "reports say that they are also in use in some parts of Europe and America." I was puzzled by the use of "reports" here, since it seems like such basic and easily verified facts would be taken without qualification. Moments later, though, I realized I had been listening to Radio Havana Cuba! A simple turn of phrase revealed a lot about the flow of information in and out of the island nation. And finally, I learned that only in the sacrament can you get God's forgiveness through imperfect contrition (desire not to sin for fear of God). In this case, "knowledge of theology is a matter of life and death," the man said! If you pray for forgiveness of your sins at home, you'd better have perfect contrition (desire not to sin for love of God).
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Dec 21, 2007 19:06
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mas posted:woohoo! Girlfriend got me the 2008 Passport book for Xmas! Yep, it's glorious. Tip: If you want to experiment, go around with the radio and start shutting off breakers. If most of your noise stops on a single breaker, examine what's on that, and there's a chance you can kill or reduce that interference. If the interference is outside your house, though, you're SOL.
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Dec 21, 2007 19:20
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Recently bought a Grundig G4000a for $30 at The Source. Did I do good?
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Dec 21, 2007 19:23
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WaterHat posted:Recently bought a Grundig G4000a for $30 at The Source. Did I do good? Looks like it! Passport 2007 reports a $150 MSRP, and the only cons are the lack of tuning knob, slightly high battery consumption, and slightly below-average SSB reception. The pros vastly outweigh the cons, though. Enjoy it!
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Dec 21, 2007 19:30
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Add a Kaito/Degen 1103 to the purchase list ($90). Made one of my consulting clients buy it for me from Amazon after I had to miss a movie to fix one of his servers.  According to this page, the 1103 is the same basic radio as the Grundig G5/Eton E5 just with UI and display differences, and it's about $50-60 cheaper. mrbill fucked around with this message at 09:50 on Dec 24, 2007 |
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Dec 24, 2007 07:14
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Got a Eton E5 for Christmas, I'm really pumped about it and am going to start building an antenna shortly. Let you know if I pick up anything cool.
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Dec 25, 2007 22:07
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Finally, after months and months of worrying about bills and tuition, I finally have enough to buy an E1. I think I've finally found my Christmas/Graduation gift to myself. Will let you all know as soon as I grab one (which will be on Friday because that's payday!)
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Dec 25, 2007 22:37
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the e1 is an awesome radio, had one for a couple of years, hooked up to a g5rv outside. Pulled in Darwin, Australia one Sunday afternoon . Not bad from the UK. We also have a Grundig G5 (== Eton E5) for travelling or in the summer sitting outdoors in the bottom field drinking gin and tonic and listening to weird African stations and the occasional ranting preacher. We pull in wefax from all over the place and enjoy trying to decode any or all digital modes we come across. We also have a small weather station in the top field consisting of a PC, a home-made QFH up a tree, and a dedicated 137MHz receiver for the NOAA satellites. Oh, and I've also got an IC PCR-1500 PC-controlled scanner hooked up to a double discone which is fun for general radio snoopery. It can also be pretty good fun picking up pager broadcasts in POCSAG and FLEX formats - these can be decoded with the aid of a small "data slicer" interface on the PC and there's a surprising amount of data going around on what I'd previously thought would be a dead format by now given the ubiquity of SMS. But there's a lot of stuff there, I've even intercepted pages to MPs telling of a meeting in the PM's office that afternoon! Radio geekery is fun, and I'd rather listen to shortwave than whatever passes for mainstream radio these days .- Yak (MW3OXX)
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Dec 26, 2007 14:33
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AstroZamboni posted:Be sure to post what radio you bought and how much you spent on it. I want to add stats on monetary drain caused by this thread to the OP. drat you Amazon with your one click witchery! 
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Dec 27, 2007 08:03
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Got a ICF-SW7600GR for Christmas and... I haven't been able to get much of anything. Still figuring it out though
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Dec 28, 2007 00:49
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ahh, good times with single malt whisky and listening to ranting about the Antichrist with databursts phasing through every now and again. I do love shortwave .
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Dec 28, 2007 00:53
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I got a G5/E5 for Christmas, and I broke it out tonight. So far I've got a bit of something out of China, Radio Sweden, and a few random religious things. I've been looking around for something to listen to, without too much luck so far.
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Dec 28, 2007 03:37
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maplin.co.uk appear to be doing the Eton E5 for £65 until the end of January, I'm very tempted to get one as that seems to be the best UK price I can find online, unless any other UK goons know of any better? Edit: Too late I bought one. You can add the above to your total! Arthur fucked around with this message at 05:17 on Dec 28, 2007 |
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Dec 28, 2007 04:02
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I got a Grundig Mini 300 radio for Christmas from the girlfriend. She had a tight budget for presents and totally surprised me with the radio. Does anyone else have any experience with the m300? I haven't had much time to use it yet but I will this weekend.
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Dec 28, 2007 21:17
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so last night I was sitting round drinking beer and listening to one of the mad preacher channels on 5070kHz and taking the piss out of it with some chums on IRC. At one point the station gave out its address as "1300 WWCR Ave, Nashville" (the station is WWCR, Worldwide Christian Radio). Pretty impressive huh? Must be an impressive station to have a street in Nashville named after it, and #1300 too, must be a lot of buildings there. So I looked it up on Google Maps. Turns out the place is at the rear end end of Nashville, and "WWCR Ave" is a tiny track. That goes behind a junk yard, and has just one small building, presumably #1300, at the end of it. It'd be like me calling my driveway "Stinky Ox Boulevard". Bloody phony scamming Christians. There's another channel I get in the daytime sometimes which seems to consist of loony-rear end preachers interspersed with completrely egregious quack medicine crap. Exhorting their listeners to go ahead and give up their doctor-prescribed diabetes treatment in favour of the powah of GAWD and their magical 'erb supplement. Ofcom in the UK would never let you broadcast that kind of poo poo. I guess the FCC don't care as long as it's aimed offshore. What's happened to mad old Brother Stair? Last time I went through a phase of heavy SWL he was all over the place, but I haven't heard a peep out of the mad old fucker just recently.
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Dec 29, 2007 14:16
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Numbers Station on 5885 kHz. Some gal belting out numbers in Spanish. It's currently 12:15 AM MST. Would love to know if anyone else is picking her up. I'm located just outside of Salt Lake City.
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Dec 30, 2007 08:17
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IonClash posted:Numbers Station on 5885 kHz. Some gal belting out numbers in Spanish. It's currently 12:15 AM MST.
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Dec 30, 2007 10:36
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Thanks to this thread I bought a Grundig S350 Deluxe. I haven't had much success with it so far but it's definitely going to get a lot of play when the weather clears up and I have some time to sit down with it. I did, however, pick up some Christian surf-rock, which was pretty neat.
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Dec 31, 2007 02:40
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bweep boop! posted:I did, however, pick up some Christian surf-rock, which was pretty neat.
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Dec 31, 2007 03:08
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Sexy Pants posted:As a pretty hardcore surf-rock fan, I'm pretty curious here. Do you remember the frequency and when? Was it instrumental? I don't, sorry. I was just passing by and caught the last minute or so. I remember it was part of a Canadian program, and it actually had lyrics (imagine the Beach Boys singing about Jesus). It then went on to gospel so I think it was really just an amalgamation of whatever religious tunes they happened to have that day. I tried looking for any info about the band/genre/program on Google, but I didn't have any luck.
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Dec 31, 2007 03:42
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This thread is pure gold. It took a few days, but I finally read it all. I plan on getting a radio very soon. It did inspire me to scan across the standard MW AM stations. I also figured out that Zamboni must be living in the east valley (snotsdale / mesa), since it looks like the radio Disney transmitter is somewhere along the 202. I would've loved to take a radio up to the top of Lookout Mountain and scan around. (Sadly, my wife and I left Phoenix last July to move up to a tiny little place in Southern MN. There's not a lot around, so I'm looking forward to what I'll be able to pick up.
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Jan 2, 2008 03:01
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It's burgin' time! 
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Got my 1103 in tonight (bought direct from Kaito via Amazon). I'm impressed with the build quality, but I have one single nitpick: Unless I've completely missed it somewhere, the only way to get above 21.something Mhz is to punch a frequency in directly *and* use SSB - there's no way to just use the knob to tune from 21.x to 29.999 Mhz and look for stuff. I was able to pick up WWV at 5 and 10Mhz (along with a bunch of fire-and-brimstone preachers) just using the whip antenna at my dining room table. Impressive.
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Jan 3, 2008 07:52
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Whoo, finally checking in! I've been stuck for weeks in a town which is a cross between lake woebegone and the Twilight Zone. I'm fairly certain our internet access reliability has been dependent upon the whims of an obscure hindu deity who also happens to be a bastard. It goes down if it snows, or if somebody sneezes in Australia. Anyhoo, it looks like the holidays were awfully good to all of the radio goons, and the OP has been updated with fresh financial drain stats. And yes, I am from the East Valley, right around the 202 and Dobson.
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Jan 3, 2008 22:04
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You may as well tack on another $90 to the total. I'm sending my DX-394 halfway across the country to be modified into something useable by Lowbander. He's going to do all the mods on this page with the switchable IF mod rather than the Kiwa filter. During it's absence, I plan to put an antenna up on the roof. The landlord doesn't care as long as it's not an eyesore... Any recommendations? I'm in central Jersey in the middle of town, no large buildings around.
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Jan 4, 2008 03:55
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Now that I've got some more spare time, I've taken to trying to find places to take my portable radio and see what I can get. For anyone in Taipei thinking about this, I can wholeheartedly recommend heading up into the mountains/teashops of Maokong out back of Muzha. There's nothing more awesome than sitting outside at a mountainside teashop, brewing some locally made tea and exploring the radio waves, reel antenna rolling down a few meters of hillside. On a related note - what do those of you in city apartments do to minimize interference? I could be overestimating the impact of it since I really know poo poo-all about how electrical interference works, but Taipei is essentially a giant combination light-bulb/computer/television, and I can't help but think that's got to be loving with reception possibilities.
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Jan 5, 2008 17:40
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Well, I suppose now's as good a time as any to chime in with my purchases. I've always been fairly interested in radios, but this thread motivated me to actually get involved. I'm now a foundation level radio ham in the UK .I'm not sure how many of these are relevant to the grand total, so just ignore the ones that aren't. Ham license: £25 ($50) Icom IC-725 HF Transceiver (second hand): £200 ($400) MFJ-971 ATU: £80 ($160) Antenna parts (20 metres of wire, dipole centre, coax, insulators etc.): Roughly £20 ($40) Crappy chinese "Quansheng" handheld VHF FM transceiver: £30 ($60) GRE PSR-282 VHF/UHF handheld scanner: £50 ($100) These prices are rough estimates, since I bought them over the past few months and can't remember the exact prices of all of them, and I am of course using the oh-so-accurate USD:GBP exchange rate of 2:1. If there's any interest, or if I feel like it anyway, I'll post some pictures of my setup later. The IC-725 covers 500khz to 30Mhz when receiving, according to the manual, but I can tune it down to 30khz. Can't actually hear any stations down there, but maybe none are transmitting. What's awesome is hooking up my big HF antenna to the handheld scanner and listening for airliners. I've made SSB and PSK contacts with people in the rest of Europe up to about 2000km away so far, using 10W, and I've only tried it a few times. I was listening on the 20-metre band the other day, and I heard an American from Maryland booming in with a very strong signal. It seemed like the rest of the continent was also picking him up very well, because as soon as he stopped calling CQ, there was a massive babble as at least 20 or 30 operators all tried to reply to him. In the end he had to go by numbers in callsigns (i.e. only calling stations with "1" in their callsign, then "2" etc.). I've also heard the Lincolnshire Poacher and that Israeli numbers station. Spooky stuff.
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Jan 6, 2008 16:09
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Add another Grundig G5 to the list- I received it as a Christmas present. I also bought the 2008 Passport to World Band radio. I'm building the homebrew magnetic loop mentioned in the updated OP. I've found out a few things that might help those of you who are planning on building one but haven't started yet. First, a small (1.5 inch) piece of 5/16 inch wood dowel will fit into the 1/4 inch diameter copper tubing with very little effort and eliminates the need to otherwise anchor the antenna at the top. Just slide the dowel through the hole you've drilled in the top of the main section of PVC and work the copper tubing over each end (it's easy, despite the diameter difference). Second, you can get a coax-to-mini (1/8 inch) plug adapter at Radioshack (part number 278-267), so if you already have an extra piece of coax with plugs on each end (which is what I had), you can eliminate half the soldering associated with the feed line. Just screw the adapter onto the cable and plug it right into the radio. Finally, for the tripod, try using something slightly larger than 1 inch diameter PVC. That's what I used, and I literally had to hammer the 3/4 inch PVC main section into the 1 inch base. The interior diameter of the 1 inch PVC does not allow the main section to rotate, in my experience. Of course, I'm not the most handy guy, so you may have better luck. Even without the tuning capacitor attached (today's project), there is a significant reduction in external noise when using this loop. I can't wait to see how it performs once I can actually tune it.
san_dingo fucked around with this message at 19:33 on Jan 6, 2008 |
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Jan 6, 2008 19:28
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Hey, here's something I think the people who've been following this thread might find interesting: Last week I went to a New Year's family party, and I brought up the subject of shortwave radio, the Conet Project, and numbers stations. My grandfather said that he worked in Communications in the Marines during WW2, and one of his tasks was to monitor the numbers stations! What he said was this: "In the War, I was in Communications, and what I had to do was to listen to the numbers stations. They were broadcast on a military frequency, but I'm sure anyone with a shortwave radio could listen to them. What I had to do was to listen to the stations, and type down the numbers they were saying in five-character blocks. We all knew there was a message in there, and it was from our Government, but we didn't know what it was." I thought that was pretty cool. And about the fact that the people behind the Conet Project copyrighted it (because no one else would claim the copyright): "That's how it is: you steal it for yourself and then copyright it, so that everyone has to pay money to you for the right to use it."
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Jan 7, 2008 02:39
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TimeLady posted:And about the fact that the people behind the Conet Project copyrighted it (because no one else would claim the copyright): Perhaps they copyrighted *their compilation* - not the actual content? At least they put it all up for free download.
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Jan 7, 2008 02:43
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mrbill posted:Perhaps they copyrighted *their compilation* - not the actual content? That could be so. Regardless, the only government that actually acknowledges that they run numbers stations is the Czech government IIRC.
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Jan 7, 2008 03:00
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I picked up a Grundig Mini 300 for $29.99 at Radio Shack today. I'm listening to radio Taiwan right now. I plan on getting a G5 when I get a little more money to work with. This is cool.
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Jan 7, 2008 03:03
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I got a sony ICF-SW7600GR (~160 USD) for christmas this year! I'm pretty amazed at all of the stations I could pick up in Boston on a cold winter night. It's much better than the Grundig FR200 I had before, and has SSB as well. I'm a little worried reception in Austin won't be nearly as nice as in Boston - it tends to be more humid and hazier. I also live right across from a bunch of radio towers of some sort. Either way, it's been fun using the passport to world band radio to listen to different stations.
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Jan 7, 2008 03:14
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Damnit, I never see this thread when it's on page 1, I always have to go diggin' for it. Anyway, check out this thread at QRZ. Apparently Solar Cycle 24 has started creeping in, and conditions are gonna be gradually getting MUCH better from here on out. Most "experts" (old geezers who have been hamming forever) say we shouldn't really notice much until sometime around March; and prolly won't improve dramatically until next year. But gently caress, I'm pretty excited This is the perfect time to start getting into HF - especially 10 meter. I'm in the process of obtaining a 10 meter rig and a decent antenna to cram into my Civic somehow. 10 meter rigs are relatively cheap if you know where to look (the one I'm getting is about $120 and has 25W), and they'll be getting pretty popular soon as the band begins to open. They are also good for noobs like myself, because you only need a Technician class license to work 10 meter. And speaking of licenses...GET A LICENSE! Seriously it's cheap and not very hard at all. I'm gonna get mine on the 26th, and all I've been doing is taking the practice tests at QRZ.com over and over. I can ace Technician and do pretty well on General now and I've only been doing them for a few days. Where do you take the test? Check around for local ham groups and call em' up. The test is only like $10. We definitely need more goons on HF.
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Jan 7, 2008 06:26
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| # ? May 9, 2024 22:49 |
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I just paid a total of $133 dollars on Amazon for an Eton E5 and a 2008 Radio Passport. I am hoping that I don't get a lot of interference since I live in dorms. I also hope that the Eton rocks. Thanks for making this thread. I always wanted a radio but I didn't know which one to buy.
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Jan 7, 2008 06:30
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