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HF Beacons / Re: Possible insight in to the Hiker beacon
« on: May 13, 2016, 1905 UTC »
Thank you gents. My main receive is a Grundig Satellit 750 and the longwire is about 45-50 stretched straight across my roof, and then hooks down another 20' or so straight into my window and into the receiver, which has a speaker wire type connection. It's very low tech. 
I'm going to homebrew a magnetic loop following a link I got from DJ Dickweed, but I've been slowly gathering the materials and been waiting for a good day to do it. It should be big enough to help with lower band reception. The problem with the 750 is that it's very sensitive to the local AM (MW) transmissions in the lower SW frequencies. Sometimes WWV at 2500 or CHU at 3330 power in enough in to be listenable, but otherwise anything much below 3500 is an unlistenable mess, even when using the internal antenna.
As for 3500-10000, those bands just tend to have a lot of interference in general for me, although it decreases as I go up and pretty much is not a factor at all about 13500. Any signal with good power overcomes the interference but weak or distant ones can be a struggle. I may be able to get a longer and higher longwire put up along another angle (I hear that it's good to get 1/4 wavelength or so above the ground, which is pretty high when your wavelength is 60m) but I may just need to get something professional. I live in the city about 10 miles from the center, decent amount of land but restricted by the fact that my house powerline cuts across my back yard diagonally, so things like G5RV Jrs or horizontal loops are pretty much ruled out if I don't want to risk electrocution.
At some point I want to get an SDR (probably the SDRplay since it looks like it gives a lot of bang for the buck), and I've been tipped to a couple of horizontal antennas that may just work. I'll see what the magnetic loop does for me first, and perhaps that second longer longwire.
I'm going to homebrew a magnetic loop following a link I got from DJ Dickweed, but I've been slowly gathering the materials and been waiting for a good day to do it. It should be big enough to help with lower band reception. The problem with the 750 is that it's very sensitive to the local AM (MW) transmissions in the lower SW frequencies. Sometimes WWV at 2500 or CHU at 3330 power in enough in to be listenable, but otherwise anything much below 3500 is an unlistenable mess, even when using the internal antenna. As for 3500-10000, those bands just tend to have a lot of interference in general for me, although it decreases as I go up and pretty much is not a factor at all about 13500. Any signal with good power overcomes the interference but weak or distant ones can be a struggle. I may be able to get a longer and higher longwire put up along another angle (I hear that it's good to get 1/4 wavelength or so above the ground, which is pretty high when your wavelength is 60m) but I may just need to get something professional. I live in the city about 10 miles from the center, decent amount of land but restricted by the fact that my house powerline cuts across my back yard diagonally, so things like G5RV Jrs or horizontal loops are pretty much ruled out if I don't want to risk electrocution.
At some point I want to get an SDR (probably the SDRplay since it looks like it gives a lot of bang for the buck), and I've been tipped to a couple of horizontal antennas that may just work. I'll see what the magnetic loop does for me first, and perhaps that second longer longwire.
