New Radio Gallery

The Blog or Die! menu features a new item, the Radio Gallery. It’s an array of photo of radios I have owned, most actual photos but a few product photos. It’s not complete and I will be tinkering with it over time. The old confusing Photo Album is kaput.

Posted in Radio | Leave a comment

Lost Loves

I was over on eBay today and they showed me a radio for sale, one that elicited a pang of regret. It was a Grundig G4000A receiver. The one below was my main receiver for a few years. It’s has PLL tuning and SSB.

Grundig G4000A LW/MW/FM/SW/SSB

It has that same direct frequency entry scheme that I don’t like in my current somewhat similar Sangean ATS-405 (and XHDATA D-808 et al.). Still it brings up pleasant emotions. I could buy the one on eBay that looks pretty good, but I already have too many radios.

The other is this Realistic DX-300.

Realistic DX-300

Mine died and fool that I was, instead of getting it re-capped (probably the issue) I threw it out in the trash. There I confessed. I did it. I still have the Radio Shack store sales slip for it, way back in about forty-something years ago. I spend many evenings surfing the tropical bands in the early evening.

I’ve sold a ton of Grundig radios over the years, including GrundigG3, G5, G6 Aviator, G8 Traveler II, Mini300, M400, Platinum Traveler, RK-709 S350DL, S450DLX, Yacht Boy YB-P 2000, Yacht Boy 206, Yacht Boy 230. But I mostly collected those and didn’t use them. The attachment really isn’t there.

I sold a few Tecsuns, including the PL-210, PL-380, PL-390, PL-606, PL-880, R-919 and R9702, but with the exception of the last two less than memorable ones, they were all replaced by something similar.

There was a Sangean ATS 606A that I hardly took out of the box before I sold it — didn’t like how it worked. And there are long gone, Cobys, Degens, Kaitos, Kchibos and Realistics.

Enough nostalgia for one day. If you’d like to view some photos, I have an album.

If you dig deep enough on this blog, you’ll find reviews on some of these.

Posted in Radio | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Radio Silence

I’ve run out of excuses to buy radios. There just isn’t anything interesting out there in the portable category, at least not interesting enough to spend the money and take the time. I have what looks like an acceptable Emergency Weather Radio, the Zhiwhis ZWS-2415, and of course my Qodosen DX-286 daily driver. I have options for SSB. And for testing I have lined up:

  • ATS25 max-Decoder
  • RTL-SDR Blog V4 SDR
  • An array of power banks
  • Reducing EMI in my home
  • New long wire antenna outside

Radios I’m not buying:

Tecsun H-501

Tecsun H-501

By all accounts, it’s a fine radio, but it doesn’t add much beyond a second speaker to my existing PL-990. It’s also really big and it’s expensive, over $300 US.

Continue reading
Posted in General, Radio | Leave a comment

Surprise Radio: RTL-SDR Blog V4 SDR

I’ve had an RTL-SDR Blog V3 SDR for a few years, but I haven’t blogged much about it beyond the article on SSB. In the intervening years, RTL-SDR Blog has come out with V4 of the dongle, a software defined radio device that one might misidentify as a USB flash drive except for the SMA antenna jack.

It’s really an amazing device, covering from 500 kHz up 1.766 GHz. With software, it supports SSB, FM RDS and digital noise reduction.

RTL-SDR Blog V4 SDR

I decided on the SDR Sharp (SDR#) software to run on my tablet PC back with the V3 dongle and continued with it for V4. Installation is a bit complicated, requiring multiple items to be installed. All I can say is read the instructions carefully and follow exactly. It went smoothly this time, compared to a real mess with the old one.

There is a long list of improvements for V4, detailed on the product data sheet. Notable are improved sensitivity and notch filters to reduce strong broadcast band interference.

I got through the software installation and hooked it up briefly to my new 40-foot outdoor antenna. I got some stations, including a very weak one from Radio France on 21580 MHz. I compared the signal with my Qodosen DX-286 and boosting the gain on the dongle allowed it to surpass the DX-286. It got my attention.

As time permits I’ll post some videos and experiences.

Update:

I installed SDRSharp on my desktop computer and the SDR works there too. I never thought I’d get anything amid all the RF noise, but it’s good.

Posted in Product Reviews, Radio | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Incoming Tool: UNI-T UT658DUAL USB LCD USB Type C Digital Tester

UNI-T UT658DUAL USB LCD USB Type C Digital Tester

Cheap thrill here ($21.99). This little fellow can evaluate the performance and capacity of a USB power bank, and by extension an emergency radio that can charge a USB device. I have no confidence in product promises for battery bank capacity. I know that some of them, based on their weight alone, have impossible capacity specifications. One example had an advertised capacity MORE THAN THREE TIMES the theoretical maximum based on its weight.

When this arrives next week, I probably won’t publish an article on it, but I will be using it to test some of the power banks/emergency radios I have.

Continue reading
Posted in Product Reviews | Leave a comment

Killing the Noise

I believe, and I think most other shortwave listeners would agree, that the biggest problem facing our hobby today is noise, radio frequency interference (RFI) from other electronic devices.

Long Rambling Preface

Just sitting here typing on my wireless electronic keyboard, connected to a desktop PC, connected to two LED monitors, with a desk illuminated with an LED lamp, just to the right of a LCD weather station display, above a desk drawer containing an outlet strip with USB charging ports, sitting beside an AC adapter powering an 8-bay battery charger, wireless mouse, on top of a wireless PC speaker and an AC-powered Wi-Fi network extender, not to mention a smartphone, all within 3 feet of me, provides ample examples for potential for generation of RFI.

A few years back, I took three approaches to reduce the noise. I put a chair outdoors far away from the house with a 20 ft. wire up a tree antenna, I got an MLA-30+loop antenna installed at a far corner of the house with a shielded antenna lead in the window, and I went on an active search and destroy mission to find and eliminate the sources of the noise. That was because the first 2 approaches didn’t help.

The find and destroy approach had partial success. It discovered one particular device, a Nitecore D2 battery charger, that created more noise than everything else put together. It was beyond belief how bad it was, just plugged in, whether actively charging a battery or not. It saturated the whole house with noise so that the only way I could find it it was by singly turning off every breaker in the house, and once the offending circuit was found, I had to turn off and unplug every device and outlet strip until the noise stopped.

The other offending device was my electronic dog containment fence. It uses an Invisible Fence Boundary Plus® Dual Loop Transmitter to inject 10.7 kHz or 7.5 kHz signals into buried wires around the perimeter of my property. Those are high audio frequencies, not what we expect as radio. Nevertheless, the unit creates a raucous crackle on my radios everywhere between 4 and 6 MHz.

Continue reading
Posted in Radio | Tagged , | Leave a comment

I Need a New Battery! Mregb YD-819?

“I need a new battery! Can you hear me?”

I suppose you have to be a pretty old gamer to get the reference from Return to Zork. I really don’t need a new battery, but I wanted one. Technically the 81 kWh battery in my car will keep my phone charged over any foreseeable power outage.

Readers may remember that my last power bank purchase did not go well. Armed with a little more sophistication, I took another visit to Amazon for a battery whose weight was not totally at odds with the capacity in the device description.

Power-Bank-Solar-Charger – 42800mAh Portable Charger, Solar Power Bank, External Battery Pack 5V3.1A Qc 3.0 Fast Charger Built-in Super Bright Flashlight (Orange)

Mregb YD-819 Power Bank
Continue reading
Posted in Product Reviews | Tagged , | 2 Comments