The fellow with the hard hat standing next to one of the three big power company trucks parked in front of my neighbor’s house said they were working on the transformer and the power would be off for a couple of hours.
For most people, the failure of electric power is an inconvenience, but this morning it was an opportunity to do some radio listening without the usual electronic noise blanket. I grabbed my accessories bag and two radios, hurrying outside to see what I could get. The two radios happened to be my almost constant companion Qodosen DX-286 and my Tecsun PL-330, recently featured in a Fred In the Shed video on the subject of what radio to buy at different price points.
The experiment started off as a comparison of ATS on the two radios using their telescopic antennas (that conveniently are the same length); however, there wasn’t much on beyond some strong signals from WRMI, and that’s no fun. I’ll share this one clip from Radio Habana Cuba on 11760 kHz at 14:48 UTC (10:48 local time).
One signal did intrigue me though, a very weak one in 15515 kHz. It was barely audible on the radios with the whip antenna. The challenge: improve reception. The successive attempts were:
- Try both radios with telescopic antenna outdoors in a lower-sloped area of the yard.
- Try the 20-foot wire up a tree (WUT) antenna (no ground) in a lower-sloped area of the yard.
- Try an MLA-30+ indoors, higher altitude
- Try my still higher up 40-foot wire out the window (WOW) with ground and a 1:9 balun. I rarely use this antenna because of electrical noise.
The language sounded like Chinese and the schedule (short-wave.info) listed only one possibility, FEBC from the Philippines, a no-slouch daytime catch.
Here’s the video of the whole affair that found the WOW antenna gave the best results:
Instead of WUT, perhaps I should call it my ANTenna.
