14552.0 : RUNY CW XXX XXX DU78 DU78 85509 KRUGLÄ K 331 331 UPSOPSIH ... 77K (23AUG23 1010) (AJT)

12461.0 : RUNY CW FBMC FBMC DE Y87S Y87S (28AUG23 0600) (AJT)

Using Tecsun PL660 and Telescopic whip 

50.5823° N, 3.4644° W

 

The above are two photographs of my washing up bowl pond! It has been an enjoyable project and makes a nice feature in the garden. For year one I bought some Starwort online, and it did a super job of keeping the water clear and fresh. But by year 2 it was looking a bit sorry for itself. After reading you could use watercress from the supermarket, and as it was under £2, I decided to give it a try. You just buy the bag of salad watercress (the big-leaved stuff and not the "mustard & cress tiny stuff) and put it in the water, floating freely. There is no soil in my pond, but some pebbles, and I hinestly didn't think it would work. But it did, and it does, and within a few days the cress was forming healthy-looking roots and settling in nicely. Within weeks it was huge! And soon tall white flowers were towering over the frogs and pixies! I thinned it out to enable me to see the water. And now, 9 months later and the following January, it is still alive and the water crystal clear, despite one or two nights where the pond froze completely. I am confident, as the temperatures rise again in spring, that the cress will grow nicely again, but if it doesn't, a quick trip to Sainsbury's and I can get some more.

 

This is a short video demonstrating the fault I have with my Swinburne Electronics CR600

For those of you living in the south of England and listening to VHF airband traffic over France I hope the above will be of some help. They are taken from the AIP for France on the 30th of December 2021 from section GEN 3.4. The AIP package is available to download for free from the SIA website but you need to create an account first and check out, even though the AIP package PDF file (approximately 1 GB) is free. 

 

4182.0   23JUN20 2225 USB RMCW West, Naro Fominsk channel marker "T"
5292.0   23JUN20 1940 USB RMCW West, St Petersburg "Fazan 37" channel marker "D"
8123.0   23JUN20 0950 USB french fishermen "peche" "pecheurs" catch weights etc
6824.0   22JUN20 0732 CW 5 figure groups // no ID
9996.0   21JUN20 0839 CW Moscow Time Signal ID "RWM" slow morse . good signal
8191.0   20JUN20 2025 CW Russian Navy Kaliningrad RMP msg to Russian Baltic Fleet REO
  321.0   18JUN20 0918 CW St Mary's Isles of Scilly NDB beacon "STM"
10871.0 16JUN20 1906 CW Single Letter Beacon Moscow "C"
  345.0   14JUN20 0745 CW Villacoublay AFB near Paris NDB beacon "TA"

 
RMCW: Russian Military Commandment Network

I've been experimenting with loop aerials for years as from my very first project I was wowed by their ability to reject local noise and give me back my hobby of short wave listening, which was becoming increasingly difficult as RF noise plagued the ether.

My first loops were ugly and crude but worked extremely well and saved me lots of money. Over the years the designs have improved and looked more like something I was proud to have in the shack.

But being interesting in a huge chunk of radio spectrum, from LW right up to HF, I needed to swap loops around. A lot. And even assuming I could have made a passive tuned loop to cover all of this, I would still have needed to retune each time I changed frequency.

In the end I suppose I compromised and ended up with a wide 2.1 to 18MHz loop for HF (well, most of it) and pretty much neglected LW, MW, and NDB DXing.

So it had long been an ambition of mine to build my own active loop. The Wellbrook loops were too big and too expensive for me, and with the little outside space I have available being plagued by RF, would need to be sat inside the shack, and to be honest I found their design too ugly for this!

The AOR active loops were my favourite, but still they were very costly and I was put off by the very small 30cm diameter. I know from my own experiments that doubling up to, say 60 or 70cm, gave a huge in signal, especially on the 5 and 6 MHz bands, were I do a lot of utility DXing.

So I decided to build my own. And it has been surprisingly straight-forward.

I bought the amplifier ready assembled from Rainville Communications in California. Luke there was incredibly helpful, and after patiently explaining to me what I needed for the project (I was getting confused between an active loop and adding a PRE-AMP to my tuned loops, that would have added more noise and little else) I ordered the LAMP-1A HF Receiving Loop AMP.

Putting it all together was really simple, though you do need to have basic soldering skills just slightly beyond what you might need to build a passive tuned loop, but only ever so slightly. If I can do it, anyone can! I had given months of thought to how I wanted it to look, as this was very important in this build. I wanted a small, somewhat flatter box than my normal bulky looking ones, and a sleeker, lower-profile design. I wanted a little LED to show me when it was on, and ideally to give an indication of the amount of gain I had selected. The variable gain is simply a variable resistor (potentiometer) used to reduce the power (I chose a 1K linear which is about perfect). I used a 75cm Witzig Hula Hoop from onbuy.com and 15mm single hinge clips from Talon to secure the loop to the project box.

So for £50 I ended up with what I think is a very sleek-looking loop which outperforms anything I have ever made before. The AMP is superbly quiet and generates no noise at all, unlike previous supposed "low noise" RF Amps I have bought before from China for £6.

Rainville state it is an HF AMP, but it works extremely well all the way down to 200khz, which was a really nice surprise when I was testing it out. I spent a long time comparing it to a larger passive tuned loop, and in every respect it outperformed it. I was really surprised as I had a pre-conceived notion that any kind of amplifier in a noisy RF environment was a big no-no.

The joy of being able to hope around from NDBs in the 400khz band to HF, back to MW, and all without re-tuning or swapping loops is indescribable. SWLing heaven!

I am attaching some photos of the loop. I have also done Youtube video

Message me via comments on this blog or my Youtube Channel if you want to ask me any questions. I enjoy hearing from you and chatting about this fine radio hobby of ours.

73 Adam

I then put the battery inside a small memory card folder and neatened thing up a bit.

Although the battery read 3V when I inserted it, after just half an hour it had gone down to 2.8V and after a 30min power down, the memories were empty again. So I left the DX394 connected to a 13.8V power supply overnight for two consecutive night, to fully charge the new battery and since then everything is working splendidly.

I can't tell you what a joy it is to have the memory working again. The radio has been reborn. To switch on in the morning and see the right time, no flashing, and my last used frequency, with all the memories intact is indescribable joy! I must be a true radio geek!

Had it not worked, I would have bought another DX394 cheaply and tried again, as I have always loved this radio. The MW and maritime MF bands are incredibly sensitive. HF sensitivity is excellent. The memories are quick and easy to use and program and change and delete. The display is large and pleasing to look at.
Sadly AM broadcast listening is fatiguing. Most people agree here. But I use a DX400 for broadcast stuff nowadays, and with its excellent murata filters and audio quality use the 394 for aero/utility monitoring, MW and maritime MF.

I'm a big aero fan, and always monitor Stockholm radio and Shanwick. The DX394 is perfect for this.

Anyway, message me if you need an advice via the comments or QRZ (M6RDP). I just wanted to show you this excellent mod here on my blog.

Bye. 73

I was beginning to think that the only aircraft ops I could hear these days on short wave was via Stockholm Radio (oh and my latest exciting catch of Saudi Airways on 8968khz)

But on the latest arrival in my shack, the XHDATA D808 from Australia, I was tuning around its extremely user-friendly memories when I came across some South African sounding voices on 13330khz. Turned out to be Kenya Airways Ops control in Nairobi selcalling KQ250 en-route to Seychelles and KQ 211 inbound from Mumbai with METARS/weather reports.

So this was on 17th June 2019 at 1755UTC on the XHDATA D808 indoors on its telescopic whip.

The XHDATA is simply superb for a quick check on each memory channel and then a quick tune up and down a few khz of each channel and all without the need to switch between VFO and memory mode which is what I have to do on the Tecsun PL660.

I am going to do a review on this latest radio to come out of China later on, but I have had my eye on it for about a year, since reading about its very well implemented VHF airband, and FM RDS which are both features I knew I would use a lot.

I've also had some great catches the last few evenings on 8879khz with Mumbai radio working lots of aircraft travelling from the Gulf to India. Qatari Airways, Express India, Singapore Airlines..... it's been superb.

A while ago a radio listener from Australia contacted me with photos of his passive HF loop whose creation my blog had helped inspire. I thought I'd posted photos on my original page Inductive vs Transformer coupling but I'm forgetful and scatty and had forgotten. It's a far more attractive loop than my own and shows you what a professional finish can be gotten from homebuilt antennas.



I really like this concertined plumbing pipe for small loops. It looks well professional and much better than the thinsulate grey plastic pipe lagging I've tried before. I shall have a scratch around the plumbing suppliers to check it out.

Thanks to Mike at HF Aero Blog I have just heard my first HF ops frequency for years, apart from Stockholm. Caught Saudia OPS in Jeddah talking in English to SVA806 as it started its descent for Dhaka. So this was 31.May.2019 at 1722UTC.

I miss the written frequency guides of the 1980s and 1990s and also the Airwaves frequency guides from Photoavia Press, and to be honest I have been a bit lost without them. Internet stuff is mostly decades out of date and I haven't found any blogs that are useful for HF frequencies. Sure I know the North Atlantic, South Atlantic, MID, SEA, INO, PAC ATC frequencies. And several military SSB ones for German, French, Portuguese, Spanish and USAF. But my main interest is civilian stuff, and then mostly the OPS/LDOC side of it.

There's a Russian LDOC freq active on 11193 khz I think. Anyone know of anymore???

It can't just be Saudia and Aeroflot who use HF!

I will try and blog EVERYTHING of interest here.