During the last few days, I have been listening to shortwave instead of the familiar syndicated shows on domestic radio. Recent listening has been a lot better than just a year ago. The signals are getting stronger and more stable, and more stations can be heard.

On Sunday afternoon, I was able to hear CBC Radio One on 6.160 MHz with a better signal than I had been able to receive before. A few stations could be heard on 25, 22, and 19m. In the late afternoons and evenings, I am hearing a pretty good number of signals on 31m and on 49m. 40~41m seems to have more HAMs on it than broadcast stations.

Last night, I was hearing a lot of Spanish language programming from China Radio International, Radio Exterior de Espaņa, Radio Havana, and Radio Marti (a US propaganda station that broadcasts to Cuba).

The English language service of Radio Havana was on 6.180 MHz. Somewhat comically, a VOA station fired up underneath it sometime during the evening.

Of course, the "Radio Wingnuts," led by Head Wingnut Steve Wingate K6TXH, are on every night on 3.740 MHz, lower sideband.

That is the ' 40 meter Ham Band " and its been a U.S. Amateur Radio allocation for probably 60 years now.

The only difference is that 15 years ago, I remember hearing the HAMs on 40 meters during the day and then hearing them leave the air in the evening, as the high-powered broadcast stations started coming in. Today, I hear very few broadcasters on that band. Interestingly then, as now, I do hear a few strong broadcast signals just outside the band. WWCR one that comes to mind. The other bands also have a few broadcast stations just outside the band edges.

This is what my 2006 Passport to World Band Radio says:

"7 MHz (41 meters) 6890-6990 kHz and 7100-7600 kHz --- 6890-6990 kHz and 7351-7600 kHz currently out-of-band; 7100-7300 no American-based transmitters and few transmissions targeted to the Americas. Some years hence, the 7100 kHz lower parameter may shift to 7200 kHz with 7200-7300 kHz rather than 7100-7300 kHz being for outside the Americas"

What a mess! The 40 meter "ham" band is 7000-7300 kHz, but 7000-7125 kHz is RTTY,Code and data only.

Passport lists plenty of international SW stations that are "out of band"... who is running this show?

Funny stuff:
In a broad area of the SW band between 13.37 and 13.61 MHz, in AM mode, I hear signals that sound like a bunch of Cuckoo clocks going off... Anybody here know what these signals are?

Anybody know where the sunspots went?

Years ago we retired our old Gates BC1T when some Ham operator bought it and modified it for his use...a big piece of old gear in the house...would'nt have to turn the house heat on in the winter!

3.740 MHz is in the 80 meter ham band.

The 40 meter ham band is shared with shortwave broadcast.

I am a hypocrite. I went lax on composing the above post and just listed off a bunch of stuff that I heard. I never meant to imply that I thought that 3.740 MHz or 6.180 MHz were 40 meter band frequencies.

Yes it is

> In a broad area of the SW band between 13.37 and 13.61 MHz, in AM
> mode, I hear signals that sound like a bunch of Cuckoo clocks going
> off.

I am hearing the same type of signal around 12.150 MHz. It sounds like a series pulses of RF that sweep in frequency. If you turn on your BFO, you will hear a sound that rapidly decreases and then increases in pitch. I suspect that this is some type of over-the-horizon radar system.

Thanks! I thought most of that stuff shut down after the end of the "cold war" (I believe the Oregon facility is in moth-balls). It looks as if some are also used to measure weather conditions, ocean currents etc.

http://www.etl.noaa.gov/technology/archive/othr/

I hear similar signals around 4.41 to 4.61 MHz.

Yesterday, I heard a few DRM signals, as well. I do not have the equipment or software to demodulate DRM, so I don't know who was broadcasting on these stations.

Pretty good list of DRM stations here:

http://www.wwdxc.de/drm.htm

I think the one on 9890 just turned on, (it sounds much like IBOC in CW mode), but I do not have the software to decode it either.

Australia is operating an OTH radar called Jindalee, and I read they are developing it further.

If I had been an adult 20 or 30 years ago, I would have embraced the whole ham radio thing. But (perhaps unfortunately), the thrill of communicating with people from far away places has been killed by the accessibility of the internet. Sorry, but the novelty of ham radio just doesn't work in today's world.

It's kind of bitter-sweet for me though; we all might like to not have access to a map of the world, for instance, so that we could join in the fun of exploration. But the progress that has come from our knowledge of the world more than makes up for it.

> Sorry, but the novelty of ham radio just doesn't work in today's world.

You're right, and I'm not arguing with what you're saying. My comments are simply that there are still a number of broadcasters on shortwave, and not that the propagation is getting better, I'm starting to hear more of them.

We do take a lot of stuff for granted. For instance, I didn't realize, until I saw an article on transatlantic communications yesterday, that the first transatlantic cable capable of handling audio signals was laid in the mid 1950s!! That answered why up until that time, live radio broadcasts from Europe had to be relayed through shortwave--it was the only game in town!

Today, if you just want to communicate with people in far away places, there are cheap solutions that will let you do that. The fact that soldiers in Iraq don't need MARS* because cell phone coverage is available there says a lot to me.

Yet, there are still some people like myself, who want to experiment with antennas, radio propagation, amplifiers, etc. for the sake of doing it. These people aren't going to keep the shortwave broadcasters on the air, as the broadcasters just want to disseminate their views and propaganda as long as there is a large enough audience. However, I think that these people will keep at least a few signals on the amateur bands for the foreseeable future.

*MARS--Military Amateur Radio Service. In the past, soldiers would talk to family in the US or send them messages through shortwave radio. This was a joint project between the military radio operators and HAMs in the US.

Where can I recieved BBC World Service on Shortwave for the Portland area. What is the best shortwave frequency to recieved BBC World Service. Also, radio band 5,000 kHz, 10,000 kHz, & 15,000 kHz is fun to listen to.

http://www.popular-communications.com/PC%20HighlightsAug08.html

"*MARS--Military Amateur Radio Service. In the past..."

Actually, it's Military Affiliate Radio System. And MARS is still around!

6160kHz in the 49 meters is 1,000-watts CKZU, relaying CBU 690 in Vancounver. The transmitter is located next to CBU's stick. The main signal is sent northwest so you're hearing it on the backside of the beam. It used to have a stronger signal in its old 500 watt days with a different antenna

Vancouver also used to have CKFX on 6080kHz. It was the world's lowest power shortwave station, relaying CKWX 1130 with just 10 watts. It was occasionally heard in Portland. The transmitter became too difficult to replace and the license was cancelled last year.

CKZU almost met a similar fate when CBC applied to the CRTC to switch to CBU to FM. While the FM license was granted, the AM was required to remain. Radio folks expect CKZU to not go away as a result.

In other news CFRX in Toronto on 6070kHz is expected to return the autumn, relaying CFRB. A new 1kw Armstrong unit was purchased and a new antenna system has been rebuilt. The old Bauer shortwave unit was too difficult to maintain....

Bauer .... KBPS ... Shortwave... it all fits....

CKZU was pretty strong this afternoon. I am pretty impressed that a sidelobe of a 1000 watt directional signal can get out that far!

I have been listening for CFRX 6070 kHz, and now it makes perfect sense that I can't hear it! I think that on some occasions, I may have heard a Mexican station on that frequency. That also answers the question I'd been pondering regarding whether any Bauer 707s were modified for broadcast service in the shortwave bands. When I lived in Alabama in the early 1990s, I could routinely listen to CFRX during the day, just using a small portable radio with its whip antenna!

The Beeb no longer broadcasts to North America. You might have some luck snagging their broadcasts to Central America or the Far East:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/schedules/frequencies/index.shtml

I could hear CKFX on some afternoons just a year or two ago. I didn't realize it was gone.

I spoke too soon on the CFRX transmitter. After doing a search, I found out that the transmitter used there was a Bauer 701B. This is a 1973 vintage design that is solid state up to the finals. The tubes are 4-500As, rather than 4-400s. See http://www.oldradio.com/archives/hardware/sparta-tx.htm for a mini-gallery of Bauer transmitters.

The old Bauer CFRX transmitter is shown at the following website:

http://www.odxa.on.ca/cfrb/cfrb2.html

It was putting out 1200 watts into a vertical before it went pzzzzzt.

CKFX has been off the air for several years, I don't think there were any DX reports this century. The only other active "commercial" Canadian on 49 meters is CFVP out of Calgary on 6030 with 100 watts relaying AM 1060. It can make it to the Northwest when Cuban jamming of Radio Marti is not too fierce. Best time to try for CFVP is after 9pm Pacific on Sunday nights when Radio Marti signs off for maintenance. You have a few hour window then....

Oops, I meant CKZU it was that I heard some afternoons. (6160)

> Sorry, but the novelty of ham radio just doesn't work in today's world.

Sure it does...there are all sorts of modes of operation such as PSK31, MT63,RTTY, D-Star and much more. It's not just voice and CW anymore.

Yep, PCs and sound cards have made amateur operation an exciting new ball game. It's a bit beyond me, but sure is intriguing to read about, having been a marine RTTY operator back in the day. QRP data sounds like fun, and halfway decent dual-conversion synthesized receivers from China are in the $100 range today. I.e., it's accessible to today's kids.

I finally stopped feeling guilty about never getting my code speed back. But for anyone interested, I'd recommend William Thompson's CW3, a cute and capable freeware Morse trainer (which I find time to practice with just about as often as I practice the piano...) I found it after trying many other downloadables (and even wrote one in BASIC back in 1983 on my TRS-80 Color Computer).

A little while ago, I was playing with one of the free Linux programs that are out there for decoding Slow-Scan TV. The few images that I was able to receive in the short time that I used that program were interesting, to say the least! In my opinion, the surprise of watching these images as they are slowly rendered on the screen as they are aired is a lot more fun than looking at Internet collections of such images.

The SSTV protocols that are widely used are analog, but the challenge of displaying these images is that they are transmitted slowly, over the course of many seconds. The first SSTV systems used old radar CRTs, although I suspect that a storage oscilloscope could have also been used as a display. Today, a PC's memory is the most effective way of storing the image as it is received so that it can be displayed completely when the transmission finishes.

Although I have my reservations about wanting to transmit audio digitally in real time, especially if it is done using proprietary systems like D-Star, I think that transmitting text, files, telemetry data, etc. is a more proper use for digital modulation techniques. I am only a partial Luddite.

Similar programs are available to produce slow scan images from the weather satellites. I have not had much luck with the orbiting birds on about 137MHz, as they seem to get "out of range" before I can download a complete map. I got some nice pictures from GOES-W on 1691 MHz using a "coffee can" feed mounted on an old 10 ft dish. Fun stuff!

Lately my shortwave DXings have involved teletype......in fact, although not exactly shortwave, I caught some decent skip of an Alaskan Navtex tower a couple weeks back, along with some stuff from BC & CA.

I am using my Grundig Yacht Boy 400, a Sound Blaster AudioPCI CT5803 (please don't laugh too hard) and Frisnit's Navtex software on the Optiplex. http://frisnit.com/navtex

(Unfortunately, the medium-wave tuner in the Grundig only goes down to 520 kHz because of a limitation in its design......Navtex operates on 518. While this may be only two kilohertz away [and in the words of my rather inexperienced Cousin, "not that big of a deal"] it can sometimes be enough of a difference to *really* wreck your chances of proper Navtex decoding! Fortunately, Frisnit implemented an "invert" function into his software, e.g. for those odd moments when tuning your radio to the wrong sideband is pretty much unavoidable....... ;o)

If you want, I can post some of the Navtex text that I received.

I haven't had too much experience with SSTV and Radiofax (read a bit about it and played with MMSSTV software a little bit tho.....) but I caught some SSTV on 4344 (USB, I think) last Saturday, loud and clear, if anyone wants to try picking that one up........