Mount Evelyn DX Report

  SAVING THE VOA DELANO 821A-1 TRANSMITTER I regularly listen to a very informative and entertaining bi-weekly podcast called the Ham Radio Workbench. It focuses mainly on technical aspects of electronics and developments in amateur radio. However, occasionally the show features special guest Dennis Kidder W6DQ talking about classic radios. In a recent episode, Dennis regaled listeners with a story about the legendary Collins 821A-1 broadcast transmitter. In 1965, the Voice of America modernised their transmitters at Bethany, Delano and Dixon, installing three 250kW Collins 821A-1 transmitters and two Continental 617A transmitters at each site. The Collins gear turned out to be quite a unique engineering feat, the technical details of which you can read at the Broadcast Belgium website . In 1988, Dixon was closed, followed by Bethany in 1994. Finally, in 2007 the Delano site was ordered to shut down and the entire facility was to be bulldozed and headed for the scrap heap. But a gr...

DX QUICK TIPS February 13, 2021 Once again this past week, propagation conditions were NOT spectacular. The solar flux index bounced around in the low 70s and, at times, Maximum Usable Frequencies (MUFs) returned to depressed levels around 13 MHz. So signal paths on the higher frequencies have behaved like they did in the past few years, largely closed to multi-hop propagation. Yet, with a bit of digging around, some good DX signal sometimes cut through the noise floor. Highlights from the list below include 4010 Kyrgyzstan , 4775 Peru , 5039 Brazil , 6185 Mexico , 11770 Nigeria , and 12085 Mongolia . It is also pleasing to see the return of some language services from All India Radio , including Swahili on 15030 kHz. RIGS : Yaesu FTDX3000, Kenwood TS2000 and Kenwood R5000 ANTENNAS : 100m horizontal loop, 30m vertical delta loop, and an inverted vee for 14 MHz All times in UTC, all frequencies in kHz // = The same broadcast simultaneously on another frequency i.e. in parallel. ⭐⭐ 4010....

  DX QUICK TIPS Guest Contributor:  Ron Howard My thanks to Ron Howard for his monitoring observations, which he sent a few days ago. Unfortunately, I got tied up with a few other things and so there was a delay in publishing these notes. However, Ron's observations are well worth noting - perhaps you will hear them from your own DX location! ( Rob) Ron Howard  LOCATION: Asilomar State Beach, Calif., USA RIG : CR1 ANTENNAS : 30m long wire All times in UTC, all frequencies in kHz // = The same broadcast simultaneously on another frequency i.e. in parallel. AUSTRALIA. 5055, Radio 4KZ, 0800+, on Jan 31. "National News"; items about "lockdown quarantine"; weather; spot about history of sports in Australia; pop songs (Peter Frampton - "Baby, I Love Your Way," etc.), commercial announcements. CHINA . 6145 // 9630, CNR17, 1703, Feb 2 (Tuesday). Thanks very to Dr Hansjoerg Biener (Germany) for his valuable feedback about the // 6145, that I had not heard befo...

RETRO RECEIVER REVIEW #17 ALLIED / REALISTIC SX-190 by CRAIG SEAGER VK2HBT Allied Radio was a U.S. company founded in the 1920s, ostensibly to distribute spare parts for Columbia Radio Corporation, but later branching into general electronic components.  It fulfilled several government contracts during World War 2, later returning to consumer electronics and publishing a regular catalogue that was pawed over by many a young hobbyist.   Among its products were transmitter and receiver kits sold under the Knight Kit brand, which were a cheap entrée into shortwave listening during the 1960s and 1970s.  Although the performance was generally only average, many teenagers (and older folk!) constructed models such as the ubiquitous Star Roamer series, along with other superhet and regenerative designs.  For lots of enthusiasts of my acquaintance, this was their golden age of radio. Allied also released some receivers under its own badge, all built in Japan, incl...