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The Muffinlord
Mar 3, 2007

newbid stupie?

sh1fty posted:

You guys have really made me want to get a SW radio. Been deciding over the G3 and G6. Be honest, would I be super pissed that I can't listen to ham guys if it's my first ever foray into the weird rear end radio world? I know it's only an extra $50 for SSB, but still. What do you think?

Pull the trigger. The lack of selectable single-sideband options is really, REALLY annoying. Plus, the sync feature, if you get a more recent one.

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sh1fty
Jan 22, 2004

TC the Giant posted:

Pull the trigger. The lack of selectable single-sideband options is really, REALLY annoying. Plus, the sync feature, if you get a more recent one.

Pretty much the answer I expected but it's good justification.

What exactly is the sync feature you guys are always talking about? And why is everyone pissed if somethings "not in sync".

Radio Nowhere
Jan 8, 2010

sh1fty posted:

Pretty much the answer I expected but it's good justification.

What exactly is the sync feature you guys are always talking about? And why is everyone pissed if somethings "not in sync".

Without getting too technical sync is a radio tool that will help bring in a AM signal more clearly. An AM signal is 3 parts, the carrier and two sidebands. Sync replaces one of the sidebands with a internal "radio made" sideband so the radio only needs one sideband and the carrier for reception. This can useful when one of the sidebands is bad, like nearby stations splashing over onto the signal you want to hear. Or a weak signal can be made "stronger" using the strongest sideband. It's not a fix-all for reception but can take it can take a lovely signal and make it very listenable.

What happens when a sync radio is "not in sync" is the radio-made sideband is off causing a squealing when it's activated. When this happenes the sync is beyond useless so you don't want to spend the money on that feature and have it squeal on everything.

Catastrophe
Oct 5, 2007

Committed to burn twice as long and half as bright
This lousy website...

The shortwave thread made me want to get a shortwave radio so I bought one. Owning a shortwave radio made me want to study for my ham radio license and get a little HT again. I got my license and got a Yaesu VX-8R. Having a ham radio license made me want to get into HF. I bought a Yaesu FT-817ND. Having that made me want to get a computer interface so I could explore things like CW and PSK. I bought a Signalink USB PC interface and set up both of my laptops to work with it. Having that made me want to get a narrow filter for the FT-817ND to help with CW and PSK work so I got the Collins 300Hz filter for it. Having that made me want to maximize my ability to talk to others and actually get a decent antenna so I ordered some antenna building components and ordered an antenna tuner.

I went from having a single little shortwave radio on the floor to being surrounded by computers, antennas, wires, devices and radios. My living room is constantly just the sound of crackling static and bleep-bloops from CW.

It's all your fault.

JammyLammy
Dec 23, 2009
I've been playing around with my G3, but I sort of realized that there is alot of features on it that I don't really understand that well. Sadly the manual that came with it was pretty lacking in that regard.

Any good sites that give very in depth explanations about it?

bing_commander
Aug 14, 2009

In other news..
I just bought a G3 today, so you can add $150 to the list for me. I was tempted by the g6 because it was smaller, cheaper, and had a little astronaut printed on it, but I decided against it. Most of my G3 seems to be high quality, but the tuning knob is on crooked and the page/time button is turned to the right a little. Sitting on my back porch I've been able to hear a few crazy preachers, some Mexican/South American stations, and one that I'm pretty sure is from India.

Catastrophe
Oct 5, 2007

Committed to burn twice as long and half as bright

JammyLammy posted:

I've been playing around with my G3, but I sort of realized that there is alot of features on it that I don't really understand that well. Sadly the manual that came with it was pretty lacking in that regard.

Any good sites that give very in depth explanations about it?

Danger Kick posted:

I just bought a G3 today, so you can add $150 to the list for me. I was tempted by the g6 because it was smaller, cheaper, and had a little astronaut printed on it, but I decided against it. Most of my G3 seems to be high quality, but the tuning knob is on crooked and the page/time button is turned to the right a little. Sitting on my back porch I've been able to hear a few crazy preachers, some Mexican/South American stations, and one that I'm pretty sure is from India.

I have a G3 as well. The SSB (USB/LSB) modes will allow you to listen in on ham radio traffic instead of just picking up crazy christian fundie stations. As a general rule, frequencies below 10MHz will use LSB and frequencies above it will use USB. The most popular ones seem to be 80m and 40m from what I've been able to pick up with my FT-817ND. There could also be a bunch of traffic on the 20 and 10m bands but I haven't played around with those too much yet. The 40m band seems jam-packed full of CW traffic at night. With the G3, your best bet is to put it in one of the SSB modes and pick the parts of the bands set aside for phone (voice) traffic and scan through slowly with the dial rather than the tuning buttons since too many frequencies are skipped with the tuning buttons on the front. I just now put mine in LSB mode and set it to 7125KHz and slowly started scanning up and immediately ran into a bunch of hams chatting.

The phone portions of the following bands:

80m: 3600-4000KHz
40m: 7125-7300KHz
20m: 14150-14350KHz
10m: 28300-29700KHz

You can also TRY to use it for CW (morse code) decoding by finding some broadcasts (SSB modes with the side switch set to narrow seemed to work best for me) and then using a cable to plug in the audio output from the headphone-out into the mic jack of a computer and fiddling with a program like CWGet or DM780 to have it decode the morse code into text for you. I did that with my FT-817ND last night and was able to pick up a guy from Slovenia broadcasting morse code. I live in Philly.

You could also theoretically use it to pick up signals like SSTV or weatherfax or other digital modes that you could decode with it attached to a computer. I wasn't successful in my attempts to do that though.

I'm a newbie to this stuff though. I'm sure others can offer more advice on how to get the most out of the radio.

bing_commander
Aug 14, 2009

In other news..
This thread has pushed me into the radio hobby and now I want a scanner. I've done some research, but I'd like some advice. Should I look for a wideband receiver or stick with a scanner? I'd like to spend around $150, but my maximum budget for one is $200. Can I get something worthwhile for that?

If anybody has recommendations for specific radios, especially ones you've had hands on experience with, I'd love to hear them.

Lucid Smog
Dec 13, 2004
Easily understood air pollution.

Danger Kick posted:

This thread has pushed me into the radio hobby and now I want a scanner. I've done some research, but I'd like some advice. Should I look for a wideband receiver or stick with a scanner? I'd like to spend around $150, but my maximum budget for one is $200. Can I get something worthwhile for that?

If anybody has recommendations for specific radios, especially ones you've had hands on experience with, I'd love to hear them.

Are you saying that you want to listen to VHF/UHF local services (police/fire/traffic/etc.)?

If so, chances are very good that wherever you live those services are using a trunked mobile radio network. In this case, you'll need a trunk-tracking radio (scanner) in order to make any sense of what is going on. What radios your local services are using would dictate the minimum level of scanner you would need. If it's just trunk tracking with FM voice, you can use a cheapo scanner. If they're using something fancy and new like Project 25, you're looking at like $350-$400 I think minimum for the fanciest scanner around. The radioreference.com site has a very good database of every locality and what's going on on the airwaves there.

A "wideband" receiver, which probably means something that can receive 100kHz to >= 1.3GHz, almost never has a trunk tracking option. It also almost always has really lousy performance in HF. So unless you're doing something like satellite reception, local fixed services, hams, or other people not using anything like trunked mobile, you're not going to be able to do a whole lot with it.

If you want to listen to HF, then you don't want a scanner, but want an HF receiver. There is lots of stuff in this thread about that, given that it's a shortwave thread. You can get a shortwave receiver, like the Grundig G3 or something, or a more expensive HF receiver like a Drake R5 (no longer made), Icom R75, or some fancy software defined radio like an RF-Space SDR-IQ/SDR-14.

What exactly is it you think you're most interested in doing?

bing_commander
Aug 14, 2009

In other news..
Yeah, I've read about trunking and looked at some radios at Universal-Radio. I found one within my price range and found it for a little less on Amazon.

http://www.amazon.com/Uniden-Bearcat-BCT8-BearTracker-TrunkTracker/dp/B000167OAC/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1278635983&sr=8-1

It doesn't have the military aircraft frequencies, probably not the land ones either, but it does have 800 MHz and trunking. Is this thing any good for a budget scanner?

Lucid Smog
Dec 13, 2004
Easily understood air pollution.

Danger Kick posted:

Yeah, I've read about trunking and looked at some radios at Universal-Radio. I found one within my price range and found it for a little less on Amazon.

http://www.amazon.com/Uniden-Bearcat-BCT8-BearTracker-TrunkTracker/dp/B000167OAC/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1278635983&sr=8-1

It doesn't have the military aircraft frequencies, probably not the land ones either, but it does have 800 MHz and trunking. Is this thing any good for a budget scanner?

It looks reasonable to me. I used the Radio Reference wiki page as my reference.

It doesn't support P25 or digital vocoders, but does support a lot of trunking control channel types. It won't work with the 700MHz public safety rebanding, but most/all of that stuff is going to be P25 anyway. It looks like there's a firmware update for the other 800MHz analog rebanding though.

If your local services are using the freqs in the receive range of this receiver, analog voice, and one of the control systems it supports (which seems to be most of them), you'll be good to go. Also, it covers the AM civilian aircraft band (108-137MHz).

At worst, you can buy it and if it sucks, doesn't work, or isn't worth it, you can return it.

Lucid Smog
Dec 13, 2004
Easily understood air pollution.

Radio Nowhere posted:

Without getting too technical sync is a radio tool that will help bring in a AM signal more clearly. An AM signal is 3 parts, the carrier and two sidebands. Sync replaces one of the sidebands with a internal "radio made" sideband so the radio only needs one sideband and the carrier for reception. This can useful when one of the sidebands is bad, like nearby stations splashing over onto the signal you want to hear. Or a weak signal can be made "stronger" using the strongest sideband. It's not a fix-all for reception but can take it can take a lovely signal and make it very listenable.

What happens when a sync radio is "not in sync" is the radio-made sideband is off causing a squealing when it's activated. When this happenes the sync is beyond useless so you don't want to spend the money on that feature and have it squeal on everything.

I don't want to be too pedantic but I don't think this is what synchronous AM detection and demodulation is. The main difference is that you don't use the old simple dumb diode method of demodulation, which has lots of issues with linearity and giving the appearance of overmodulated AM when the carrier fades relative to the sidebands. Also the noise in each sideband isn't in-phase with respect to the carrier which can hurt demodulation performance.

Synchronous AM detectors reconstruct the carrier tone from the received signal using some kind of phase-locked loop usually, then mix the negative of this signal in with the received signal. This shifts the signal spectrum to 0Hz, or basebands it. Then you low-pass filter at the receive bandwidth and perform a product detect of this signal. The product detection (which is used in a superheterodyne receiver, btw) has the benefit of not being suspectible to issues with the transmitted carrier level (or even presence) and the fact that the AM demodulation is now phase-coherent.

I think the fact that the demodulation is coherent increases the processing gain (I think by two times, or 3dB) by taking advantage of the fact that the signal information in each sideband is phase coherent while the noise is not. Thus you can receive signals with lower received SNR using this method.

If you (or you radio) does not correctly estimate the actual frequency of the carrier extremely accurately you would say the radio is "not in sync" and it'll sound terrible.

bing_commander
Aug 14, 2009

In other news..
Are the Radio Shack scanners any good? I'm was looking at this scanner and realized that the Radio Shack scanners are just rebrands of that company. It supports trunking and has a lot of frequencies, but it does look a little cheap. I'm not a hardcore radio nut yet, so would one of these scanners be okay for me, or would I regret trying to save a few bucks?

Lucid Smog
Dec 13, 2004
Easily understood air pollution.

Danger Kick posted:

Are the Radio Shack scanners any good? I'm was looking at this scanner and realized that the Radio Shack scanners are just rebrands of that company. It supports trunking and has a lot of frequencies, but it does look a little cheap. I'm not a hardcore radio nut yet, so would one of these scanners be okay for me, or would I regret trying to save a few bucks?

GRE scanners are rather well regarded. In fact, if you want to spend a lot of money, they make what is argubably the most feature filled and "best" scanner you can purchase at the moment.

They have a weird system for programming frequencies and trunk banks that takes some getting used to (so I hear) but it is very flexible.

The DSP algorithms to perform the trunk tracking are also very good in the GRE radios.

I guess maybe they look a little cheap, but I think most hobbyist scanners look (and are a little) cheap. They perform very well, so as long as you're not using it for search and rescue or something, I think you'd find it to be just fine.

Catastrophe
Oct 5, 2007

Committed to burn twice as long and half as bright
Heads up. A strong pirate radio station has been popping up every night on 6925KHz on the USB side of SSB. Not as exciting as a numbers station but I find it interesting anyway for some reason.

AstroZamboni
Mar 8, 2007

Smoothing the Ice on Europa since 1997!

Catastrophe posted:

Heads up. A strong pirate radio station has been popping up every night on 6925KHz on the USB side of SSB. Not as exciting as a numbers station but I find it interesting anyway for some reason.

I'm currently without my antenna or receivers. I just moved from Phoenix to Colorado Springs and all my poo poo is in storage for about 3 more weeks. The radios weren't supposed to be loaded onto the ABF truck, but the movers inadvertently put the equipment box on the truck anyway. Bastards.

Anyhoo, can you post a brief description of what's going on on this new pirate station? I'm a big pirate radio fan. My dad even sent me two Radio Caroline t-shirts for my birthday!

Catastrophe
Oct 5, 2007

Committed to burn twice as long and half as bright

AstroZamboni posted:

Anyhoo, can you post a brief description of what's going on on this new pirate station? I'm a big pirate radio fan. My dad even sent me two Radio Caroline t-shirts for my birthday!

It seems to just be music, mostly. Nothing too shocking.

bing_commander
Aug 14, 2009

In other news..
I can only hang antennas outside of my house temporarily, and I'm not sure if one would work well in my attic with the air conditioners and all the vents, so I bought a Kaito Ka33 so I could try just hanging an antenna in my window. I'm having some mixed results. I haven't really determined the best way to hook it up to my G3. When I plug it into the external antenna jack about half way, the reception usually gets better, but once it goes all the way in, and the whip antenna is disabled, it gets worse. I've tried clipping the antenna onto the whip antenna which is okay, but not great, and I'm not sure what to do with the ground wire clip. Sometimes it works best if I set the antenna up and just set the cable next to my radio without actually plugging it in. Does anyone have any wise words about this kind of thing that might help me understand what I'm doing?

Lucid Smog
Dec 13, 2004
Easily understood air pollution.

Danger Kick posted:

...
Does anyone have any wise words about this kind of thing that might help me understand what I'm doing?

I think in the case of a G3 the grounding clip doesn't do much. You could attach it to a radio that had a screw on the back of it labelled RF or earthing ground, which is usually just conductive to the case, which is connected to the presumable earth ground on your third electrical prong.

The fact that you can do these sort of random things and produce better/worse results is a little bit weird. What frequencies is it you're trying to listen to? Honestly, at very low frequencies (like MW stuff) the wavelengths are so huge even this 18 inch antenna doesn't present a whole more area nor is it any better tuned than the telescopic whip attached to the G3. If you are in an urban area you're also hurting pretty bad due to high levels of all-around noise. Even if you had a tuned 1/2 wave dipole of rhombic or something, your environment would still limit your reception ability.

If your antenna is built and tuned properly, plugging it in all the way should produce the best results. You would get proper impedance matching this way.

Radio Nowhere
Jan 8, 2010
The factory that's pumping out the Grundig G3 has lately been pumping out another similar model, the Degen 1106. Looks like at the moment you can only get them on eBay and there have been some early reviews. In short the sync feature works better on the 1106, the display is a little bigger the buttons have backlight. The downsides are poorer sound quality and the radio is less sensitive. I wouldn't be surprised is those downsides are early bugs much like the earlier models of the G3.

http://herculodge.typepad.com/herculodge/2010/07/jay-allen-compares-and-contrasts-the-grundig-g3-and-the-degen-de1106.html


Some crossposting from the numbers station thread, if you want a 24/7 live stream of "The Buzzer" (4625 KHz) I've discovered this,

http://www.uvb-76.net/

AstroZamboni
Mar 8, 2007

Smoothing the Ice on Europa since 1997!
Just so everybody knows, episode 2 of the new USA Network spy thriller series "Covert Affairs" is all about Number Stations, and they did their loving homework. It is decidedly badass. It centers on an IRA station which is very evocative of The Lincolnshire Poacher.

Radio Nowhere
Jan 8, 2010

AstroZamboni posted:

Just so everybody knows, episode 2 of the new USA Network spy thriller series "Covert Affairs" is all about Number Stations, and they did their loving homework. It is decidedly badass. It centers on an IRA station which is very evocative of The Lincolnshire Poacher.

DVR set!

Vir
Dec 14, 2007

Does it tickle when your Body Thetans flap their wings, eh Beatrice?
The Norwegian public broadcaster NRK stopped shortwave transmissions quite a while ago, but still broadcast in medium wave and long wave for the fishing fleet. We have DAB radio broadcasts some places in the country, but the bosses of NRK refuse to expand coverage and have started a desperate campaign of political advertisements to sway public opinion against FM radio.
How about an ironic campaign for replacing FM with shortwave? :iamafag:

JammyLammy
Dec 23, 2009
Was listening a couple days ago and picked up what I think was some Ham chatter (around 10pm on the east coast).

Seemed like it was some going through reciting his call sign, someone else would say theirs and then he would switch to another person and repeat this process. I guess they were playing around seeing how far their signals are going, is this normal for most ham operators?

Radio Nowhere
Jan 8, 2010
EDIT: /\/\

Very common. Signal checks probably account for 90% of ham traffic. Prove me wrong!

__________________


UVB-76 (4625 KHz) is acting up again, see Numbers Thread and yet another UVB-76 thread in GBS. I figure I'd mention it here to keep this thread from dying(much like the shortwave hobby itself!).

I've tried in vain to hear "The Buzzer" just once here in Maryland. Has anyone had any luck in the states, and if so what time? I check when I can on my shortwave car stereo but nada. I can't emphasize how awesome it is to cruise the craziness of shortwave while driving or just chilling in a parking lot while the wife shops. Alex Jones on 12160 KHz at lunch makes me laugh harder then the comedy channel on XM. I still haven't fully set up my rigs at my new house yet, need to get my Icom 706MIIG fixed and hooked to a dipole soon. At the moment I'm still using portables (Degen 1103, Grundig G5, or Sangean 909) hooked to either a loop (Degen 31) or a random longwire. My last catch was probably a Cuban numbers station around 1 am (EST).

Radio Nowhere fucked around with this message at 19:57 on Aug 25, 2010

JammyLammy
Dec 23, 2009

Radio Nowhere posted:

UVB-76 (4625 KHz) is acting up again, see Numbers Thread and yet another UVB-76 thread in GBS. I figure I'd mention it here to keep this thread from dying(much like the shortwave hobby itself!)

Ha, was just reading the same thread. Then started reading the general Numbers thread (did anyone in there link them to this thread for more info on shortwave?).

Looking at the wiki for UVB-76, they know where it is. Whats to stop someone from just going there and knocking on their door?


I've been dying to catch a live number station, but I haven't had any luck so far :(

edit: That is assuming its not a russian base.

BigHustle
Oct 19, 2005

Fast and Bulbous

JammyLammy posted:

Looking at the wiki for UVB-76, they know where it is. Whats to stop someone from just going there and knocking on their door?

Google Maps has an aerial view of the facility. It appears to be surrounded by forest with no surface streets leading up to the facility.

According to the user input over at Wikimapia, that area contains a few Russian military buildings. If you look a little to the south of the UVB-76 site, you'll see an open field in the middle of the same crop of woods. Someone noted on their maps that the field is directly above a FSB secret underground base.

Regardless, I'd make sure you have your Russian translator present and let a bunch of people know where the hell you are if you plan to go knocking on their front door to ask for a tour of The Buzzer.

I haven't had a chance to put up a decent antenna since I moved, but back in Jersey I used to pick up Atencion every night around 2 in the morning.

JammyLammy
Dec 23, 2009
I know it was brought up before, but I can't help but feel that maybe I'm having problems with mine. There are suppose to be issues with 1st generation grundig g3, how can you tell if you have a first generation? Is there a serial code I should look for?

edit: Blargh, by the adaptation and apparently I have it :( 6V 250mA

Anything I can do about this?

double edit: Is there any other problems in the first generation?

JammyLammy fucked around with this message at 03:37 on Aug 26, 2010

BigHustle
Oct 19, 2005

Fast and Bulbous

JammyLammy posted:

I know it was brought up before, but I can't help but feel that maybe I'm having problems with mine. There are suppose to be issues with 1st generation grundig g3, how can you tell if you have a first generation? Is there a serial code I should look for?

edit: Blargh, by the adaptation and apparently I have it :( 6V 250mA

Anything I can do about this?

double edit: Is there any other problems in the first generation?

If you scoot back to page 74, Catastrophe went through the same thing. Call or email Eton and tell them that you're having problems with your radio and they should take care of you. They're one of the few companies left out there that takes pride in having a good product and gives a poo poo about keeping their customers happy.

JammyLammy
Dec 23, 2009

BigHustle posted:

If you scoot back to page 74, Catastrophe went through the same thing. Call or email Eton and tell them that you're having problems with your radio and they should take care of you. They're one of the few companies left out there that takes pride in having a good product and gives a poo poo about keeping their customers happy.

Thanks, I hope they just take my word for it, and not ask me for a receipt :(

JammyLammy
Dec 23, 2009
Sorry for the double post. But I have to admit that it is so drat refreshing when customer service actually goes right for once :)

Didn't have the receipt, so I had to call radio shack and have them send one (since I paid with a credit card, they keep it on file for 2 years).

Just got off the phone with Etoncorp, sent them a copy of the receipt and told them the problem. They will send me a new working model if everything turns out right.

edit: Just talked to them again. Need to send it to them, then they will check it out and repair or sent out a new one when done. I was sorting of hoping they would do the Nintendo DS route where they just send the new one and you put the old one in the box to send back. Going to take 4 to 6 weeks =/

JammyLammy fucked around with this message at 18:43 on Aug 26, 2010

ASSTASTIC
Apr 27, 2003

Hey Gusy!
I've always been interested in short wave radio and listening to stuff, and now I am interested in getting into it.

I have access in getting a Eton SATELLIT 750 for pretty cheap, does anyone have experience with this radio? Am I going too big too fast if I am just getting into shortwave?

Link to the radio:

http://www.etoncorp.com/product_card/?p_ProductDbId=351064

Radio Nowhere
Jan 8, 2010

ASSTASTIC posted:

I've always been interested in short wave radio and listening to stuff, and now I am interested in getting into it.

I have access in getting a Eton SATELLIT 750 for pretty cheap, does anyone have experience with this radio? Am I going too big too fast if I am just getting into shortwave?

Link to the radio:

http://www.etoncorp.com/product_card/?p_ProductDbId=351064

Depends on how cheap you're getting it for, that radio is a big step above the portables addressed in the op. I don't think there's "too big too fast" in shortwave radio and that Eton will make most of us envious! But if you think this is a passing interest then make sure any money spent is money you could part with if you move on. Then again a radio can be sold!

ASSTASTIC
Apr 27, 2003

Hey Gusy!

Radio Nowhere posted:

Depends on how cheap you're getting it for, that radio is a big step above the portables addressed in the op. I don't think there's "too big too fast" in shortwave radio and that Eton will make most of us envious! But if you think this is a passing interest then make sure any money spent is money you could part with if you move on. Then again a radio can be sold!

Like $180.00 cheap.

Also, I was going back on this thread and have been calling around my local radioshacks to find a Grundig G5 with no luck at all :(

Radio Nowhere
Jan 8, 2010

ASSTASTIC posted:

Like $180.00 cheap.

Also, I was going back on this thread and have been calling around my local radioshacks to find a Grundig G5 with no luck at all :(

When I got my clearance $40 G5 radio a few months ago they were down to floor models, I'm sure they are gone at Radio Shack.

At $30 more then a new Grundig G3 that 750 is an awesome deal! Like all Grundig/Eton/Degen products there always seems to be an issue with quality control sometimes so just make sure you can return/swap/warranty if something is wrong with it. The only thing you loose with a 750 is portability if that's even an issue.

ASSTASTIC
Apr 27, 2003

Hey Gusy!

Radio Nowhere posted:

When I got my clearance $40 G5 radio a few months ago they were down to floor models, I'm sure they are gone at Radio Shack.

At $30 more then a new Grundig G3 that 750 is an awesome deal! Like all Grundig/Eton/Degen products there always seems to be an issue with quality control sometimes so just make sure you can return/swap/warranty if something is wrong with it. The only thing you loose with a 750 is portability if that's even an issue.

Honestly, portability isn't really an issue because I don't plan on moving it around that much. If that's the case, I might as well get a portable one as well for the car or something.

The 750 is also only 7lbs, the only thing I would need to figure out is a power source since it doesn't run off of batteries.

edit: Nevermind! The 750 takes 4 D cell batteries or AC power.

ASSTASTIC fucked around with this message at 20:37 on Aug 26, 2010

nmfree
Aug 15, 2001

The Greater Goon: Breaking Hearts and Chains since 2006
IIRC Passport liked that Eton, it should work pretty well for you.

Radio Nowhere posted:

I don't think there's "too big too fast" in shortwave radio
Counterpoint: http://www.universal-radio.com/catalog/widerxvr/0095.html

BigHustle
Oct 19, 2005

Fast and Bulbous
Look at what I found on Craigslist. I don't think it would fit in my shack though...

http://stlouis.craigslist.org/ele/1924228797.html

JammyLammy
Dec 23, 2009
Question for you hardcore listeners. Reading the book "Shortwave listening guidebook" by Harry Helms (this book is really handy, alot of websites assume you know the basics, this will break it down for you) and they mentioned about below 150 khz is for military (usually subs) and you can get special equipment to use it.

Have you guys used it? Is there anything good on these channels or is it just boring military chatter?

edit: Because of how old the book is, some of this information is outdated and sort of makes me sad that I can't use it :( It mentioned using 1700-1800 can (was) able to pick up old cordless phone calls, this sounds like it could be hilarious to listen to. Doubt anyone uses cordless house phones these days though.

JammyLammy fucked around with this message at 02:46 on Aug 29, 2010

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The Muffinlord
Mar 3, 2007

newbid stupie?
My understanding is that VLF comms are usually reserved for the most basic messages. Beacons for navigation, simple instructions, stuff like that. The antennas for transmitting on those freqs are enormous, which really limits their uses.

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