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Thanks to this thread I picked up a G5 at Rat Shack late last week (can't find the receipt to verify exactly when, it was Thursday or Friday evening). I haven't been able to pick up a drat thing though. Regardless of whether I use the included wire or the built-in telescoping bit all I can get is commercial FM, and not very strong at that. For those who know the Northeast Ohio area, I'm in Wellington (intersection of SR18 and SR58 in Lorain County) and even 100.7FM comes in weak. I've stuck it on automatic for hours at a time without a single hit. This was a display model, so might something have been damaged? It appears physically fine.
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May 1, 2008 05:10
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Haier posted:Hello. There's a lot of love in this thread for the Grundig/Eton G5s, but I was wondering something. I read several reviews online and it seems that there were a decent amount of people that bought them and had them break hours later. It might be a Radio Shack thing too. My G5 was all but DOA from Radio Shack. FM worked, barely, but AM and SW picked up literally nothing. I returned it last night and am currently debating whether I'll get another or wait until after I take the FCC license test at the Hamvention in a few weeks.
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May 7, 2008 04:57
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Something I came across the other day and just realized it might be interesting to this thread: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fIKlp_rVqto Apparently the BMW Business CD head unit (and assumedly others) can be switched in to a European mode which causes their AM mode to allow access to MW and LW frequencies. I don't have a clue if there's anything interesting in those bands for those in the US (haven't tried it yet myself) and it seems to have a negative effect on FM reception, but for those who are interested and own BMWs here it is.
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Nov 28, 2009 08:30
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Radio Nowhere posted:Next Saturday I'm having a new headunit installed in my car. So loving what right ? The headunit is a Sony CDX-GT470U I won on Australian e-bay and is only sold in Africa/Middle East/Asia/Australia (okay anywhere not Europe or America). Again so loving what ? Really nothing special about the headunit feature wise (CD, MP3, USB, Aux, yada yada) except for one major thing, loving shortwave! Most aftermarket headunits do FM1, FM2, FM3, FM-infinity, AM1 and AM2; but this headunit does SW1 and SW2 !! Coverage is like 2300 to 7500 then 9500 to 18900 KHz I think. I'm also getting it interfaced with my steering wheel and hopefully I can have what is usually preset up/down can be tune up/down instead. Can't wait to be crusing the highways just tuning around the shortwave bands listening to crazy poo poo! I really should try that too. Most BMW head units for the last few years are international receivers, so if I pop in to the service menu and put it in to European mode it unlocks shortwave, but I think it screws up my FM.
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Mar 12, 2010 20:35
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Radio Nowhere posted:Your FM should be fine, would change the channel steps from 200 KHz to 50 KHz (so instead of 88.1->88.3->88.5->etc. it would be like 88.1->88.15->88.2->etc.). The AM steps would hurt you though since near everything outside the Americas uses 9 KHz steps as opposed to our 10 KHz step. So instead of 530->540->550->etc. it would be 531->540->549->etc., good if you DX European signals that might hide between American channels but useless for local stations. I wonder if opening up European mode would give you the longwave band (150-283 KHz) ? I checked it out and you are correct that it's AM would be hosed, which of course doesn't affect me in the slightest since US "AM" radio bores the crap out of me pretty much universally. Some of the region settings apparently do open up MW and LW, so I think I'll have to go play with it later today. I doubt I can DX anything with it though, rear window integrated antenna and it uses a proprietary connector which IIRC is like FAKRA but not. wolrah fucked around with this message at 21:29 on Mar 12, 2010 |
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Mar 12, 2010 21:27
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Radio Nowhere posted:Awesome about LW! If you're on the east coast maybe you can snag some European or African stations at night, if not you can listen to plenty of morse code beacons from airports I finally got around to testing it and found the following: Region: Europe LW 153-279 kHz, step 1 kHz MW 531-1602 kHz, step 9 kHz FM 87.5-108.0 MHz, step .1 MHz Region: USA AM 530-1710 kHz, step 10 kHz FM 87.7-107.9 MHz, step .2 MHz Region: Japan AM 522-1611 kHz, step 9 kHz FM 76.0-90.0 MHz, step .1 MHz Region: Oceania AM 531-1702 kHz, step 9 kHz FM 87.7-108.0 MHz, step .1 MHz Region: Canada AM 530-1710 kHz, step 10 kHz FM 87.7-107.9 MHz, step .2 MHz It looks like contrary to what I had been told there is no SW support on mine, but LW is there. This is for a BMW (Alpine) "Business CD" unit as found in a 10/2001 production (2002MY) 3 series. There have been a number of variants of this unit found in different vehicles, so no promises anyone else's is like mine. I've read of some units not offering region selection (typically locked to Europe). e: also note if anyone else has a BMW and wants to screw with these modes, you will lose all your radio presets when changing regions.
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Mar 21, 2010 21:19
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Also, if you want to test your SSTV setup there was a recent change to the video game Portal which makes it spit out SSTV signals in certain conditions. People have dumped the WAV files from the game, so you can find them easily online along with the resulting decoded image to verify that your stuff it working right.
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Mar 22, 2010 21:21
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Radio Nowhere posted:I REALLY want to find one of these on eBay! What was this? It's been killed by the user.
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May 6, 2010 17:08
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SpecialAgentCooper posted:I noticed there's an antenna tuner specifically for the FT-902DM, but it seems like it'd be really hard to track down... I'm 99% sure it wouldn't matter anyways for listening purposes. Antenna tuners, as far as I am aware, are entirely for making antennas usable to transmit on a wider range of frequencies than physics would typically allow.
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Jan 27, 2011 03:31
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longview posted:It isn't overkill since you get features like the spectrum that are normally only found in $10000 HF transceivers, but it won't you much good for HF since it's limited to at best 30 MHz, just above the top edge of the shortwave bands. There are some reasonably priced DIY/kit/commercial upconverters and IIRC certain models with specific tuners can be modified to tune down to DC.
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May 13, 2013 23:29
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The reason the RTL chip acts as a SDR in the first place is to support FM broadcast radio, so there's that obviously. With the right software you can also use it as a scanner, if you're lucky and the frequencies you care about are within a MHz or so you can actually monitor them all simultaneously rather than having to switch quickly between them. With a different piece of software you can monitor ADS-B signals and see most of the air traffic in your general area. Likewise for AIS if you're near a coast or shipping channel. Pagers are also mostly unencrypted, if you're near a hospital you might see something interesting that way. As a general rule if it's audio or low-rate unencrypted data within the tuning range of the device you can probably receive it with the right antenna. I believe people have even managed to receive GPS signals with RTL devices, though it was far from ideal.
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Jun 24, 2016 18:53
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