I got Bill's trawler radio last night. Today I had a chance to hook it up to
my 5 band vertical dipole, and put a more robust set of batteries in it
(last night I had a short wire and a 9V radio battery).

When tuning across it's four bands (2 LW, AM, and tropical band SW) I found
it to be extremely sensitive, and quite selective, even without using the
bandpass filter. It does tend to overload and get a few images on MW, if the
gain is turned wide open (I don't think it uses AGC), but if it's turned to
about 80%, it's very very good. I use as my MW benchmark the AFN-Korea
outlet in Seoul. It's supposed to be 5 KW on 1530 KHz, but it really can't
be heard well much past the toll gate into/out of Seoul, about 15 Km from
the stations tower. If I can hear it here at all, I feel I'm doing good (80
Km S. of Seoul). On the Pioneer car stereo in our tracker, it's way down in
the mud. On this radio it's actually pretty listenable, though of course not
"local" sounding by any stretch of the imagination.

On LW, I received no less than six different beacons, and three Russian
broadcast stations (I wish I understood Russian!!) The beacons, at least,
were easy to differentiate, since they all have different CW ID's. Prior to
using this radio, I had never heard more than one beacon, and only one of
the Russian broadcast stations. And that was using my Grundig Satellit 650,
and/or my Yaesu FT-847, so this is really quite a radio for LW and MW. The
tropical band SW is more problematic. I can hear many Korean language
stations on there. It's difficult to tell which are local origination, and
which are images or harmonics. There are a couple, however, that can be
safely assumed to be coming from outside Korea, and beamed here in Korean
language. This can be so because there is considerable fading of the daytime
signal, which tends to rule out closeby signals and harmonics.

All in all, a great little radio. It's well worth what Bill asked for it,
and handily beats almost all of the regular bunch for AMBCB reception. With
a good speaker plugged into it (there is no internal speaker), it's even
quite good for program listening.


--
Illigitimus non tatum carborundum

*Don't let the *******s wear you down*

Brenda Ann wrote:
I got Bill's trawler radio last night.

All in all, a great little radio. It's well worth what Bill asked for it,
and handily beats almost all of the regular bunch for AMBCB reception. With
a good speaker plugged into it (there is no internal speaker), it's even
quite good for program listening.



Glad you're happy with it. Its no lie that a 40 year old Danish trawler
radio can whoop-ass over the latest whizz-bang $500+ jap gizmo when it
comes to actual reception capability.

-BM

Behold, --exray-- signalled from keyed 4-1000A filament:

Glad you're happy with it. Its no lie that a 40 year old Danish trawler
radio can whoop-ass over the latest whizz-bang $500+ jap gizmo when it
comes to actual reception capability.

-BM

Too right mate!

--
Gregg
*It's probably useful, even if it can't be SPICE'd*
http://geek.scorpiorising.ca

Yes, have a look at http://lwca.org/msglist1.htm

Mike

Subject: Never knew there was so much on LW!!
From: --exray--
Date: 10/17/2003 2:14 AM Central Daylight Time
Message-id:

Brenda Ann wrote:
I got Bill's trawler radio last night.

All in all, a great little radio. It's well worth what Bill asked for it,
and handily beats almost all of the regular bunch for AMBCB reception. With
a good speaker plugged into it (there is no internal speaker), it's even
quite good for program listening.



Glad you're happy with it. Its no lie that a 40 year old Danish trawler
radio can whoop-ass over the latest whizz-bang $500+ jap gizmo when it
comes to actual reception capability.

-BM



You are correct on that, I have been using a SP-600 for many, many years on bcb
dx and find it to be better than most of the sand state stuff out there.



Les Locklear
Gulfport, Ms.

Les:
To be fair, it must be remembered that much of what you call the 'sand state
stuff' is intentionally deafened on MW or below. I have several boatanchors
as well and I love 'em, but above 2 MHz my solid state stuff pretty much
leaves them in the dust, especially for selectivity. The shape factor of
those old xtal filters was not very impressive.

Having said that, I still love to fire up the Halli, Hammer or Collins and
cruise the bands.

--
Brian Denley
http://home.comcast.net/~b.denley/index.html

"Llgpt" wrote in message
...




You are correct on that, I have been using a SP-600 for many, many years
on bcb
dx and find it to be better than most of the sand state stuff out there.



Les Locklear
Gulfport, Ms.