Posted on 07/04/2016 9:24:15 AM PDT by Zionist Conspirator
In the ‘90’s I lived on the first floor of a 3 story apartment building. One day I strung a bare copper wire antenna on the roof, with an insulated connector wire running DOWN A DOWNSPOUT. I ran the connector wire out the bottom of the downspout and through a window to my SW radio. No one except me knew the antenna was there, and I used it for years...until they repaired the roof and took the antenna down.
My personal favorite. A brief Handel interlude at the top of every hour, with a 15-minute news program in very good English.
There is a shortwave ISM band centered on 13.560mhz.
This is the old allocation that was given to medical diathermy machines.
You hear all sorts of stuff in this little band!
Propagation on this frequency is amazing!
I build a tiny transmitter that put out 10mw and left it on a tall hill in Griffith Park. (Los Angeles)
It had a waterproof case with bits of broken solar panel glued to the top. I placed an ATtiny84 processor on the board and programmed it to check the temp sensor and send out the reading once every 5 minutes. The ATtiny84 would send the data and then shut down power to the transmitter and go into sleep mode until time for the next transmission.
A small nimh coin-cell battery was able to gather enough charge to keep the rig going 24/7
I regularly could pick up the signal in El Paso, about 800 miles away. It worked for a little over 3 years and then met some kind of sad fate.
The antenna was a simple inverted vee fastened to a nearby tree limb and connected to the radio by a 15ft run of RG8 coax. The rig was screwed down on a small stump where it could get the sun
From the FCC regs.
15.225 (a) The field strength of any emission within the band 13.553-13.567mHz shall not exceed 15,848 microvolts/meter at 30 meters.
I remember that guy. I used to listen to "Across the Atlantic" on my dad's old Hallicrafters receiver. Many is the night I fell asleep to the soft glow of vacuum tubes.
It was such a different world back when the local TV stations numbered three or four, and they all signed-off after midnight.
Related to what you say about the `yutes’ of today, I still have my Lionel train set from 1956. Collector values peaked in the early 1990’s and have tanked ever since. Ebay has a lot to do with cleaning out the nation’s attics & making yard sales nearly obsolete while lowering prices on collectibles.
But the fact is, kids don’t dig trains anymore. Talked to guys at Lionel meets who are brokenhearted they can’t get their grandsons interested in the train sets they would love to hand on. Gets put under the Christmas tree & that’s it.
Time...marches on.
I just gave an old SONY 2010 to my best friend.
It belonged to my late father...great old radio!
The 24/7 cable and satellite TV news was already killing shortwave; the internet just speeded things up.
Joe Adamov was the other, see #32, for a fascinating interview with Joe post-Cold War.
The first problem was that after a few days, the receiver started acting up. After three trips back to the factory for repairs, and coming back with more and weirder problems each time, it was declared a lemon and I got a refund for the whole thing.
The other problem was that everything I tried to listen to on the SW band was blown off the air by a half-dozen superstations (Radio Moscow, BBC, VOA, a religious broadcaster, and a couple of others). Each one was broadcasting with so much power on so many frequencies that no matter station I tried to tune in (listed in the World Radio TV Handbook) I got either nothing or one of those half dozen. Useless.
But before it conked out, the receiver was good for tuning in distant AM stations, since it had some good features for extracting weak signals from out of the noise. Nowadays, DXing AM stations is not terribly useful, since mostly what I get are simulcasts of Dave Ramsey and a couple of others.
I used to have a Radio Shack DX 66 shortwave radio. I remember on the back, it had a Motorola-Style antenna plug. One of my first cars after I became an adult was a 1963 Chrysler Newport. The cable to the whip antenna had a Motorola-style plug on it. I remember pulling the cable and plugging it into my DX 66 and then extending the whip antenna to its full 6 foot length. I was the only car in my city they could listen to the BBC while driving down the street. My greatest triumph in distance listening (or “DX-ing” as it was called) was Radio South Africa one night in the summer of 1993. That was my rarest pick up.
I have also heard Qol Yisra’el and sveral others. I actually got to call in to ‘Happy Radio’ with Tom Meijer and got on the air.
And...I still occasionally tune in to WWV and WWVH.
My FIL collected the Hess trucks, and husband has a collection going back to the ‘60s - I think Dad bought one every year until he died a couple of years ago.
We’re thinking they might be valuable, and we have nobody to leave them to who would appreciate them; but I don’t want to part ;-)
Back around 1960 a friend of mine built a Heathkit SW receiver that’s when I got into it. I went out and got a Bluapunkt. Later I had an used ‘63 Volvo that came with an AM/FM/SW radio in it and that’s where the Mrs. got into SW.
Anybody else play with SDR (Software Defined Radio)?
The ‘radio’ is a USB device the size of a thumb drive, that you connect to an antenna feed. The software (free, all kinds of plug-ins for it) does the rest. The feed comes in from the antenna, not the Internet.
I was fooling around with that recently, had to put it down for a while because I have too much coming at me. It looked promising.
Yep, I remember train sets, and enjoyed them. I never had the famous Lionel trains though.
Too many kids today may think that something such as the train sets aren’t “cool”. So many kids today play video games, that they just aren’t doing things such as running train sets.
How true, but the death (or severe restriction) of the internet might resurrect shortwave. That was my first thought after reading One Second After, and again this week after reading about an EU proposal to license all internet users. In either event, shortwave might again provide the only means of "unapproved" news from the outside world -- or any outside communications at all.
Thanks for the memories! I got started in SW when I was in high school back in the ‘70’s. My grandmother had a ‘40’s-vintage cabinet model radio up in her attic that had belonged to my great-grandfather, and she let me have it. It really opened a whole new world to me. It had beautiful sound on AM, and was pretty good on SW too. I eventually graduated to various Radio Shack Realistic models, and bought a Grundig portable a few years ago. I haven’t listened for quite a while, mainly because so many stations have gone dark. In my recent years of listening, I gravitated to the numbers stations and other oddities.
I might just dig out the Grundig later and see what’s still out there.
Yep, the day will come when a Ham Radio operator will be a much sought-out after person.
Reminds me of the old joke, "What do breasts and toy trains have in common? They're meant for children, but their dads always want to play with them."
“So many kids today play video games, that they just arent doing things such as running train sets.”
That’s it! Operating a train set taught skills & problem solving. Building Erector Set projects did the same. How about the old Handy Andy toolbox? Those were active ways of playing & made the kid smarter.
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