Messages

1141

MW Loggings / Re: Looking at MW Carriers

« on: September 24, 2015, 0446 UTC »

The sawtooth pattern your observing is most likely due to ambient temperature swings within the transmitter building that house the frequency control gear.  Most AM's use a non-ovenized crystal oscillator for frequency control.  The FCC spec for carrier deviation is +/- 20 Hz of assigned frequency, so the swings can be quite large.  Some IBOC stations have their station synthesizer locked to GPS, so their carrier stability should be many times better, typically better than 1 PPM.  It will be interesting to see this on SW, a new way to separate the men from the boys 

+-RH

1142

MW Loggings / Re: Local WKDN on 965kHz instead of 950 where they should be

« on: September 22, 2015, 2137 UTC »

Dirty switch in the frequency synthesizer perhaps.  I've seen the same issue on BE and Continental FM exciters.

+-RH

1143

North American Shortwave Pirate / Re: X-FM 6950 USB 9/20/2015 0200z

« on: September 20, 2015, 2332 UTC »

Not I, perhaps someone airing the 2014 greatest hits disc?

+-RH

1144

North American Shortwave Pirate / Re: Radio True North 6925AM Spet.19 02:15 +

« on: September 19, 2015, 0331 UTC »

Hearing Daft Punk's "One More Time" here @ 0330z about S8 with some co-channel QRM.

Thanks for the show!

+-RH

1145

General Radio Discussion / Re: Museum holds rare radio equipment

« on: September 18, 2015, 2121 UTC »

I wish they wouldn't keep putting museums like this with precious gear in places prone to wildfires, earthquakes, ect.  A couple weeks ago, a wildfire in CA destroyed on of the nation's few phone museums, which among other things, destroyed a rare autovon princess phone that Nixon had by his bedside during the cold war.  The place was insured to the hilt, and lost something like $25 Million in artifacts.

I hope nothing like this happens to these AWA folks.

+-RH

1146

The RF Workbench / Re: Balun question

« on: September 18, 2015, 2111 UTC »

The best balun for this application is a 1:1 ratio current balun.

It is probably the best because it is fairly non-critical with regard to construction.  Even poorly made ones seem to be better than nothing at all.  Both types, current and voltage baluns, will decouple the line from the antenna, but for a voltage balun to be effective and present low SWR and loss, it must be carefully constructed.

+-RH

1147

Huh? / Re: I don't want to brag...

« on: September 18, 2015, 1348 UTC »

...With or without the pads?

+-RH

1148

SDR - Software Defined Radio / Attention software gurus...anyone know how to write a QUAM decoder program?

« on: September 11, 2015, 2127 UTC »

After reviewing some off-air recordings, as well as some verified info off the web, one of the shortcomings of SoDiRA is becoming more apparent.  The problem manifests itself in hardware decoders as well, its called 'platform motion'.  Its caused by selective fading altering the phase and amplitude relationships of the composite c-quam waveform.  A clever work-around is to decode the c-quam waveform as QUAM instead, which does away with the cosine correction, and thus greatly reduce platform motion.

So, who knows how to write code for this, because I sure don't.  I'm a hardware guy after all

It might also be neat to add ISB decode as well, seeing as there is currently no way in software to do this.

Thanks All,

+-RH

1149

General Radio Discussion / Re: A trip to WBCQ

« on: September 07, 2015, 2228 UTC »

Pictures from about 2003

http://www.rossrevenge.co.uk/wbcq/wbcq.htm

+-RH

1150

General Radio Discussion / Re: Wheeler Cites Obstacles to Pirate Enforcement

« on: September 03, 2015, 0844 UTC »

Awfully hard to enforce, no?

+-RH

1151

General Radio Discussion / Re: Wheeler Cites Obstacles to Pirate Enforcement

« on: August 30, 2015, 0516 UTC »

Probably clandestine more than pirates.  You know, whoever doesn't tow the party line kinda stuff...

+-RH

1152

General Radio Discussion / Re: Wheeler Cites Obstacles to Pirate Enforcement

« on: August 27, 2015, 0523 UTC »

...I suppose he would like to make it a crime to listen to pirates as well?

+-RH

1153

General Radio Discussion / Re: RFI - It's not just for breakfast anymore

« on: August 27, 2015, 0514 UTC »

This is unfortunately what happens when you leave the doors open on regulation and let third world countries with little regard for our rules build our toys.

Just my two cents...

+-RH

1154

North American Shortwave Pirate / Re: Radio Free Whatever 6945USB 01:24 Aug 16

« on: August 16, 2015, 0146 UTC »

Peaks to S9 here @145z with MGMT's "Time To Pretend"  About +24Hz according to the Elad FDM-S2, although it's not locked to anything.
I've got dinner on the stove and laundry in the works so not a whole lot of time to listen, but I'll be around
204z with live break from DJ DW.  Backselling music, last track was Morning Parade's "Alienation", and giving me sh*t Thanks for the shout!
208z...That's why I run Linux
210z into some Jack White, signal is getting pretty rough here too, signal now about even with the static @S8.  You know the old saying, give it a minute, it'll change.
219z Live break following Noel Gallager's High Fly Birds, "Since you can't hear me anyway, go f*ck yourself, no just kidding.."

Sorry to hear you call it quits so early, look forward to your next show.

Thanks for the show, comrads!

+-RH

1155

Equipment / Re: I've added a few equipment videos

« on: August 12, 2015, 1345 UTC »

Thanks for sharing!

+-RH