Mount Evelyn DX Report

  STATION NEWS & DX QUICK TIPS  September 25, 2021 9710   CHINA. CRI - Kashi. At 0000 on Sep 24, in what was the Portuguese service, now with this endless "CRI Music" programming that seems to be replacing normal CRI broadcasts in certain languages these days. The same programming but different music was also noted on 9800 at the same time in place of the Spanish service. Recently, I have noted this in a few other services as well including European languages e.g. Croatian, German, Albanian, Italian, etc plus a few Asian languages like Amoy, Hakka. Usually, the whole scheduled service is just music or part music/part regular programming. Yet, other languages haven't been touched and continue with regular CRI programming. All a bit strange! What's the story here? Has President Xi decided that too much money was being spent on language services that held no audience? If so, why go to the expense of keeping the transmitters running with just music? Is that to keep t...

COLLECTING AND HONOURING OLD TECHNOLOGY (This post is an edited version of an article I wrote for "The World of Shortwave Listening" column of The Spectrum Monitor magazine - August 2021 issue. Further details on this excellent publication are available at www.thespectrummonitor.com ) If the Facebook social platform is anything to go by, there are still many thousands of listeners to shortwave radio worldwide. Despite the rapid decline in broadcasters on the international and tropical SW bands, a multitude of Facebook groups are dedicated to shortwave listening and ham radio activities. And there, we can often find a core band of happy enthusiasts who love collecting vintage and latter-day receivers - portables, desktop units and even big old valve radios from days of yore. Why would DXers and listeners be interested in accumulating old radio technology when we have some fabulous cutting edge Software Defined Receivers (SDR) on the market now? There are many reasons for this ...

  My radio desk from a few years back! DX QUICK TIPS September 11, 2021 Over the past week, the smoothed sunspot numbers (SSN) have made quite an uptick. For some day now, the solar flux has been hovering around 100. Consequently, reception conditions on the shortwave broadcast band frequencies above 12 MHz have improved considerably. To confirm this, I have been running one of my flea-powered 200mW WSPR beacon transmitters for a few days, up on 21 MHz during my daylight hours. The signal has been monitored multiple times into Canada (16496 km), central USA (13589 km), west coast USA (12606 km) and Hawaii (8908 km)! A bit of solar activity certainly revives the upper shortwave spectrum! 12-hour WSPR beacon today Sept 11, 2021 LOCATION : Mount Evelyn, Victoria (south-eastern Australia) EQUIPMENT : Yaesu FTDX3000, Kenwood TS2000, Kenwood R5000 ANTENNAS : 100m long horizontal skyloop, 10 MHz full-wave vertical delta loop, 14 MHz double bazooka 3959   D.P.R.KOREA. KCBS - Kanggye ....

FREE DOWNLOAD! Domestic Broadcasting Survey:   23rd Edition One of the best DX lists going around is the annual Domestic Broadcasting Survey (DBS), compiled by legendary Danish DXer, Anker Petersen. The latest and 23rd edition is now available to download at http://www.dswci.org . This unique publication is divided into three parts: Part 1 : The Tropical Bands Survey covers all active domestic broadcasting stations on 2300 - 5700 kHz, including clandestine broadcasters. Of course, these days, this section of DBS is much smaller than it was 30 years ago when the tropical bands were full of African and Latin American stations. But there is still plenty of action down in that part of the shortwave spectrum, especially from Asian broadcasters. Part 2 : Domestic stations on international shortwave bands above 5700 kHz broadcasting to a domestic audience. A21 schedules are included where available. Again, this section is primarily dominated by Asian broadcasters, and of particular intere...