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Messages - OgreVorbis

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16
General Radio Discussion / Re: Pirate radio laws outside the US
« on: June 06, 2020, 0935 UTC »
There is certainly interest from those regions!

Visitors to my jingle-playlist webpage (see images)
@ http://jingleproductions.coolam.nl

André
CoolAM Radio - Shortwave
the Netherlands

That is interesting. I wonder if those were just curious people or bots or if they actually heard it. That would be amazing. What's your farthest signal report?

Anyone here from either Germany or Poland?

17
General Radio Discussion / Pirate radio laws outside the US
« on: June 05, 2020, 0405 UTC »
Most pirates are in the five eyes countries. What are the rules like in other countries? Like Europe and Asia mostly. I know China would be pretty harsh, but what about the other Asian countries? Is anyone here from a European country and can explain what the scene is like there? (I am not necessarily talking about FM, but rather SW and MW.) In Asia, the countries I'm not sure about are Vietnam, Thailand, Laos. Clearly China would be insane, but these other countries aren't fully communist, so I wonder. I tried using google translate to find sites in other countries, but nothing obvious comes up. Maybe it's just non-existent and unexpected and therefor safer?
Not that I plan on doing it.

18
General Radio Discussion / Re: Husdon Co (NJ) TIS gets 100W STA
« on: June 01, 2020, 1128 UTC »
We should see what happens on June 20th. This is when this provision is meant to expire. If they do not lower power, they do mention in a couple clauses compliance with WRCR in NY. After that date, I think we should email WRCR and tell them it is in their best interest that the TIS be lowered back to 10W cause they are continuing to broadcast at high power. I think a message from WRCR would be enough to get them to comply given that they were mentioned in there.
There's also several other TISs using that frequency and I suspect that WQFG could also be interfering with them given that you can hear their signal across the whole east coast. Maybe notes to the other TISs would also be good.

Not many pirates on 1710 anymore, except corsair. I'd love to hear more on there again someday, but it's not going to happen with WQFG drowning out everything. Their coverage seems as good as a 1kW broadcast station, maybe they're cheating? In addition, the new pirate act doesn't include 1710, but does include the rest of the MW band.

19
SDR - Software Defined Radio / TDoA_service - Hams or FCC?
« on: June 01, 2020, 0304 UTC »
Recently I was listening to a pirate broadcast and this user called "TDoA_service" was entering some SDRs and set to the same frequency of the pirate station. Is this something that pirates typically experience from curious ham operators or is this the FCC?

20
Equipment / Re: Outdoor tuner or switch
« on: May 29, 2020, 0024 UTC »
Have you considered a knife switch?

I'll check that.

Assuming this is low band, possibly at the top of the MW band, antenna, I'd be more concerned about how you're going to get it to work at HF.

Just a normal ham tuner. You think it won't work?
Right here they show what happens when you transmit at higher harmonics on an L antenna. I won't be exactly on the harmonics, but very close.
https://www.qsl.net/kk4obi/EFHW%20inverted%20L.html

21
Equipment / Outdoor tuner or switch
« on: May 27, 2020, 0411 UTC »
I'm trying to figure out how I'm going to make my inverted L antenna switchable. This may seem simple, but let me elaborate.
My antenna as is, is just an L with a shunt coil to ground. This allows me to operate very well on only one frequency +-20kHz. Now I want to make another system to make this antenna usable on shortwave with a tuner.

I could just remove the shunt and make a full fledged L or Pi network tuner outdoors. This will probably be very time consuming with the weather proofing, etc. So basically what I think I want to do is put a switch outside to switch out the inductor and then use a normal ham tuner indoors. I know I could probably just re-tune the outdoor shunt inductor, but this will be a hassle to get it right with the tuner indoors also hooked up to it.

22
Equipment / Re: Belka-DSP : miniature DSP receiver
« on: January 20, 2020, 0616 UTC »
Never trust a Commie !

Yer, I'd wanna see inside before spending, mebbe a rtl inside it run by a timex sinclair 8088.

Hehe. I know you're joking, but I do suspect it's not a real DSP. Probably the Si4735. Which is what all those cheap clone Chinese receivers use.

23
Equipment / Re: Belka-DSP : miniature DSP receiver
« on: January 18, 2020, 0709 UTC »
I wonder if it is an actual DSP or if it just uses a Silicon Labs chip.

24
The RF Workbench / Re: Transmitter set up
« on: January 16, 2020, 0900 UTC »
Soundboard = mixer, ok I get it now...

Just record and process everything on a PC. Playback as an MP3 or whatever. Simple cheap. No need for any expensive hardware..

Str.

Yeah, you could just use stereotool, but I think you still need at least a cheap mixer to connect your mic. The kind of mics you can connect directly to a PC sound card are not the best and then you can't fade it in or talk over.

25
The RF Workbench / Re: Transmitter set up
« on: January 15, 2020, 0509 UTC »
Great advice. Yes as a ham myself that would be frowned upon for sure. Other than the transmitter and antenna. What equipment is used as far as an interface to get the sound audio into the receiver and also what would be used for the voice. This may sound a bit silly, but I would imagine theres more to it than keying down a microphone while playing music through a speaker. I used the term soundboard because it was the first thing to come to mind. Thanks for all the feedback.

A cheap mixer like a behringer and a mic pre-amp (some come with compressor, limiter and de-esser built in). These can be found at a good price from sweetwater. You also need XLR cables and maybe an XLR to 3.5mm so you can plug in a comp to the mixer for the audio. The third and final thing is the audio processor. That's pretty much all you need. The most expensive part will be the audio processor. The cheapest way if you have some technical skills is the ADAU1701. On aliexpress, you can find modules with this DSP installed. Make sure you get the programming board also. You don't need to know how to program. You can use SigmaDSP which is an audio processing program that uses visual drag and drop style processing blocks. Takes a bit of work, but it's not very hard to learn. If you want to go the easier route, then you can probably find an old optimod AM processor on ebay (but it takes some time to find a reasonable deal) and it's going to cost a bit more money. The SW200 is pretty good too. To start out, you don't even really NEED the audio processor. Just build a low pass filter for 5 kHz or whatever you want. You'll need to get some XLR cables that you can rip apart and put some resistors to combine the stereo output into mono. On this same board, you can make a little low pass filter (just need some caps, resistors and a copper clad board). Look up stereo to mono audio schematic and low pass filter schematics (there's probably a calculator online somewhere). Now you just combine that on one small copper clad PCB. Then that leads directly into the transmitter. If you use an audio processor, then you won't need the filter part, but you may still need the stereo to mono conversion.

26
SDR - Software Defined Radio / Re: Overview list KIWI WebRX's
« on: January 15, 2020, 0445 UTC »
Thank you very much  :)

27
SDR - Software Defined Radio / Re: SDR.HU
« on: January 15, 2020, 0438 UTC »
This is very annoying. Luckily, I've got some of the SDR's bookmarked and they still work fine. So if someone had the links to all of them in a list, then they could still listen.
I only have a couple bookmarked though :(

I wonder why they did this? This is going to greatly effect their popularity as a lot of SWLers are not hams. Seems like a bad choice to me.

EDIT: Well, I spoke too soon. Looks like cool AM radio posted a list: https://www.hfunderground.com/board/index.php/topic,62141.0.html

28
Propagation / Poor conditions (noob)
« on: January 13, 2020, 0402 UTC »
Hey,

I'm not a noob to radio, but propagation (other than the more obvious non-planetary/solar noise stuff) has not been something I really understand very well. I do understand the solar cycles to some extent, but I am curious about the more frequent changes in propagation that can be seen on a daily or weekly basis. What is the biggest determining factor in that?

I noticed the last couple days that the propagation has been some of the worst I've seen since I started listening about a year and a half ago. What is causing this and when is it likely to clear up?

29
General Radio Discussion / Re: Pirate Act Passes Senate
« on: January 11, 2020, 0632 UTC »
I find it odd that they chose 535 to 1705 kHz. Kinda strange. I wonder why they didn't use the typical 530 - 1710. It looks like the FM pirates are screwed though. I wonder what would happen if someone chose 87.69  :P

I also find it interesting that they are so concerned with pirate radio that they feel the need to enact more laws. It should be the least of their concerns now. The internet with its freedom of communication is much more damaging to them. Just some people playing unusual music on the radio shouldn't concern them. Almost no pirates are political, so... But they are the government afterall. Just control as much as possible is their motto.

30
General Radio Discussion / Re: WQFG689 antenna
« on: December 20, 2019, 2115 UTC »
Possible antenna:

https://www.google.com/maps/@40.7398821,-74.0570985,3a,15y,305.61h,100.9t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sdXpMIjD5PMWCaRM-s-EIHA!2e0!7i16384!8i8192

Can't believe you found that. It looks like a valcom antenna: https://www.valcommfg.ca/v-147-cl2-th
I wonder what makes this one better than the other TISs. I would expect them to all use valcoms (maybe not)?

One note for TIS hunters: The FCC database only has some of the TIS stations listed. Those operated by the federal government are *not* listed.   These include the Flight 93 Memorial in PA, and the Springfield MA Armory on 1710 kHz, as well as many other stations on other frequencies, such as those in national parks, on military bases, etc.

I filed a FOIA request with the government to get information about these "missing" TIS stations. The information is incorporated into my DX ToolBox program for Windows and macOS. AFAIK it's the only source for these stations. You can get a copy of DX ToolBox here: https://www.blackcatsystems.com/software/ham-shortwave-radio-propagation-software.html

Nice work on that program. I just downloaded it and tried it for a few minutes. I found it saying I lack an internet connection despite it seeming to work properly and download databases.


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