Mount Evelyn DX Report

DX QUICK TIPS December 30, 2028 Like many other DXers, I have been quite active on the shortwave bands over the Xmas - New Year holiday break. There is plenty of good DX to be enjoyed out there! Here's a few from my list of recent logs. Most were heard in the period between December 26 and 29: 👍 5045   AUSTRALIA. Unique Radio - Gunnedah, NSW. At 1035 UTC with the “Sounds of Your Life” music show. I can report that it was NOT the sounds of MY life! A woeful selection of second-rate antique pops from the 50s and early 60s, interspersed with pointless background info on where each song appeared in the Billboard Top 100! I’d had enough by 1115 UTC and decided it was time to move on. Transmitting in LSB mode and mixed in with the usual summer atmospherics. Interestingly, I heard this station better at my location than on any of the Kiwi SDRs located in NSW. Dec 26. 👍 5950   ETHIOPIA. Voice of Tigray Revolution - Addis Ababa. Some great regional Afric...

RETRO RECEIVER REVIEW #14 Click on each photo for an enlarged view MURPHY B40 by Craig Seager VK2HBT If, dear reader, for some perverse reason you would like to be the proud owner of a hernia, then just lift an example of this Retro Review receiver and carry it one-handed for a couple of hundred metres. At around 46kg, the Murphy B40 is no plastic-fantastic consumer set, and given its extensive use on Naval vessels of the British Commonwealth, may well be the model that the chap who coined the phrase “boat anchor” principally had in mind. I picked up relatively cheaply my second B40 from suburban Sydney a few years back, and in some misguided attempt at machismo, denied the offered assistance to carry the thing to the car, silently gritting teeth and clenching buttocks as I wrestled the hulking beast into the trunk. Subsequently, the awkwardness of getting it out again resulted in a disappointing scratch to the vehicle’s duco. Pride does indeed come before a fall!...

Book Review HAND-CARRIED QRP ANTENNAS Simple antennas and accessories to operate from almost anywhere by Peter Parker VK3YE Review by Rob Wagner VK3BVW This handy and inexpensive little e-book is well worth the small investment for the many amateur radio operators and shortwave listeners who enjoy DXing in the great outdoors! Indeed, with radio operators increasingly finding themselves under a variety of antenna restrictions from their local homeowner association (HOA), there are also plenty of antenna designs that would also work well in difficult situations at the home QTH. Peter Parker VK3YE is a long-time ham operator with tons of experience in built-it-yourself gear and antennas; skills developed over many years of trial-and-error. He is a prolific author of books on QRP and portable operations, and his somewhat quirky YouTube videos are very popular amongst radio enthusiasts. In Hand-Carried QRP Antennas , Peter emphasises that the antenna is a significant elemen...

GLOBAL WSJT-X v2.0 UPGRADE GOING SMOOTHLY Congratulations to Joe Taylor and his team on the launching of version 2.0 of the WSJT-X application, including of course the tremendously popular FT8 mode last Monday December 10. Within a matter of a few days, literally thousands of successful upgrades have been undertaken by amateur radio operators and SWLs worldwide.  Usually, I am not what you would call an early adopter of new software versions, preferring to let others install app upgrades and alert developers to any issues. I'd rather wait for a "dot-point" version or two before implementing changes. However, on this occasion I took the chance, based largely on many successful installs reported by users on two WSJT-X email lists to which I subscribe and an FT8 Facebook group. The installation on my Macbook Pro (High Sierra OS) went seamlessly, retaining all the settings that I had used from v1.9.1. It recognised my existing wsjt.log and wsjt_log.adi files witho...

CONFUSION OVER THAI TRANSMITTER SITE I often see shortwave listeners quoting a Voice of America, a Radio Thailand or a Radio Farda broadcast as coming from the Thailand transmitter site called "Udon Thani". Strictly speaking, that location is not correct! The confusion usually comes from online frequency lists such as short-wave.info , shortwaveschedule.com and shortwave.am . These websites all identify the powerful Thai transmitting facility as being located at Udon Thani. So listeners are simply copying what is listed from these sites. Let's clear up this confusion. Udon Thani is a province is located in northeast Thailand. The provincial capital is also called Udon Thani and is the major city within the province. However, the correct location of the transmitting facility is near the village of Ban Dung. When looking at a Google map of the region, if you take the Fountain Roundabout as the geographical centre of Udon Thani city, then the transmitters a...