PREPARING FOR YOUR NEXT DXPEDITION - PART 1

A lunchtime DXpedition in southern Queensland.

PREPARING FOR YOUR NEXT DXPEDITION

Part 1

(I wrote this article for "The World of Shortwave Listening" column of The Spectrum Monitor magazine - December 2015 issue. Further details on this excellent publication is available at www.thespectrummonitor.com)

***************************************

One of the joys of listening to shortwave radio is going portable - setting up the gear in a completely different location to discover what reception is like in some other part of the country (or indeed, the world!). As long as there have been radio enthusiasts, there have been DXpeditions. It’s just another part of the hobby that many of us have come to know and love.

However, these days DXpeditions have also become a necessity, especially if you live in a small home or apartment with no space for external antennas. Or, perhaps you are forced to live with a high level of man-made noise in your home listening environment.

For most DXers, long gone are the days when your place of residence was your best and most reliable location for listening. For many city dwellers, the chance to hear rare and exotic DX has become either extremely difficult or next to impossible. The local noise levels on the shortwave bands are just too high to dig out those weak signals.

This is where DXpeditions can help - and they take on many forms. It could be as simple as having an hour or so in the local park or playground. Perhaps you can throw a radio in the car and drive off for a day in one of our fabulous national parks, down by the beach, or high into the mountains. Or you might take some gear along with you on the next family holiday for a week or two. It could even involve gathering together with a few fellow radio enthusiasts and renting a shack out in the countryside (or “in the bush”, as we Aussies are fond of saying!).

Recently, one of my friends was happily DXing off the coast of Africa while sitting on the deck of the famous Queen Mary 2 luxury ocean liner! For most of us, however, a DXpedition is probably not going to be quite this fancy! And the possibilities for undertaking any type of DXpedition are only limited by your imagination.

In my teenage and young adult years, it was common for a group of us from the local radio club to have a weekend away by the beach or into the mountains. These days I tend to travel solo. For many years now, I have taken myself off on trips around the country with a carload of radio gear. And I love it! More often than not I will set up in the car for a morning, afternoon or evening’s listening. Occasionally, I also find myself DXing from a holiday resort. Usually, these places are full of the same electronic gadgets that I find in my neighborhood, filling the shortwave bands with the same sort of electrical hash I get at home, and sometimes worse! So my preference is DXing from the car or a picnic table, well away from civilization and power lines.

And while we are talking of power lines, these things are capable of radiating static and electrical hash some miles away from the source. On a few occasions, I have found myself sitting in a forest and still hearing noise on the bands, only to find that it was coming from a faulty or dirty insulator on a power pole a mile or so down the road. A DXing colleague of mine talks about broad-banded electrical noise acting like a normal radio signal and propagating itself many miles away.

One day, I selected my DXing location in what I thought was a remote part of a forest. I set up the radio and long wire antenna, and began tuning the bands. I couldn’t believe how much electrical noise was coming from the receiver’s speaker. I turned off the radio and started walking around the area to see if I could find the noise source. I eventually discovered that through the trees, about 100 yards away from where I had parked, there sat several large farm sheds with agricultural machinery chugging away! It pays to select your location carefully before setting up the gear!

Over the years, I have developed some strategies that help me obtain the best results out of DXpeditioning. Here are some things that might be helpful to think about before you take off on your next trip.

Goals

What do you want to achieve on this DXpedition? Is your goal to discover new or hard-to-hear stations? Are you aiming to send reception reports to these stations? If so, then as you gather together the information for 20–30 minutes of program detail for your reception report, realize that’s time taken away from scanning the shortwave bands for other interesting stations. That’s not a problem if your goal is to QSL new broadcasters, as long as you understand that in your quest to chase a QSL card you will have less time at your destination for hearing other stations.

But, perhaps your goal is to try and hear as many stations as possible on your trip. Band scanning then becomes the focal point of your DXpedition. This goal can be quite rewarding in itself. You get to experience listening in another location away from your home. As a result, you learn more about what’s on the shortwave bands - and especially the stations you are possibly missing out hearing from home.

Consider also how long you want your DXpedition to last. Will you be away for the afternoon or evening, perhaps a few hours? Or will you be on holiday, perhaps camping in a forest or by the seaside for several days or a week? If you will be away for a few days, then you will possibly have time to do both band scanning and detailed listening of certain stations for the specific purpose of gathering information to include in a reception report.

Propagation

What times of the day are you planning to listen to the shortwave bands? If you intend to switch on the radio in the middle of the day in high summer, you could be disappointed as you may not hear too much on the bands. Evenings, early mornings, and daytime reception in mid-winter will usually yield the best results. Are you able to pre-determine the propagation conditions in your chosen listening location? What parts of the world should you be able to hear at various times of the day from that location? Will these signals be coming via long path or short path to the receiving location? Spending time thinking about the best listening periods and likely stations to be heard will help focus your listening even more and achieve better efficiency with your time during the trip.

Location

In real estate, it’s often said that what matters is “location, location, location”! And as I have already indicated earlier, an important part of a successful DXpedition is also about picking the right location. The aim is to operate in an environment that is free of localized man-made noise. Such a location will give you the best chance of hearing weak signals. This is the major advantage of DXpeditions! It’s amazing how much difference a quiet location can make to your listening endeavors, potentially revealing all sorts of stations that you cannot hear at home.

So, the choice of selecting a really good DX location cannot be overemphasized. Look for remote destinations that are well away from residences and commercial areas. Stay well away from power lines. These can radiate electrical hash for many miles! Even rural farming locations can be a problem sometimes, especially if electric fences are used to keep the cattle on the right side of the fence (a big problem here in Australia!). Good sites to consider are forests, open bushland and mountainous regions. Destinations by the sea can also be fantastic, as long as there are no power lines nearby. Corroded connections and salt-encrusted power insulators can create much hash across the shortwave bands, making you feel like you have moved to a “home away from home”!

Space for antennas is another consideration. If your chosen destination is in national parks or state forests, then you’ll probably have plenty of space to roll out a nice long antenna. However, if you are planning to operate from a camping ground, holiday shack or other privately owned lands, then permission needs to be sought before erecting that Beverage antenna. The last thing you want is to hang one of the local residents by your antenna!

Radios

How portable do you want to be on this trip? Our choices include small handheld radios such as the Tecsun PL680, PL880, the range of Eton radios and the ever-reliable Sangean ATS909X. These days, many DXers are also using software-defined radios (SDRs) attached to laptop computers with great success. Then we have the “big boys” communications receivers and transceivers like the Icom R–75, the Yaesu FRG100, and the amateur radio transceivers from Kenwood, Yaesu, Icom and many others.

My current choice of radios depending on the type of DXpedition being undertaken. I use either the portable Sangean ATS909, the Yaesu FGR100 receiver, or the Kenwood TS2000 transceiver.

If you only have one radio, then the choice is easy. But for those of us with multiple receivers or transceivers, then the choice comes down to portability, ease of operation, which antenna you want to use (inbuilt whip or a longer wire antenna), and the space you have available for transporting your gear. Personally, I find myself using a variety of radios depending on the situation. I have a handheld portable for quick DX trips out in the field (for perhaps an hour or two of band scanning), plus a medium-sized communications receiver and a larger HF transceiver for longer or more concentrated listening activities.

➤➤➤  Click here for Part 2 of this article

73 and good DX to you all,

Rob Wagner VK3BVW

CLICK HERE for VK3BVW Live Stream (Clublog)

 Subscribe!!   Follow @robvk3bvw

QRZ callsign lookup:

© Rob Wagner, Mount Evelyn DX Report, and contributors 2012-2020