Late-nite DXing

[Howard Glazer]

----- Original Message -----
From: A. Joseph Ross <joe@attorneyross.com>
To: Cohasset / Hippisley <cohasset@frontiernet.net>
Cc: <boston-radio-interest@lists.BostonRadio.org>
Sent: Saturday, February 23, 2008 10:34 PM
Subject: Re: Late-nite DXing


> On 23 Feb 2008 at 19:50, Cohasset / Hippisley wrote:
>
> > For the next 4-1/2 years there was hardly a night I didn't go to sleep
> > listening to AM broadcast band "DX" on my little 5-tuber.  Somewhere I
> > still have the reception log I kept.  I lived in the Finger Lakes of
> > upstate NY, and my only local station went off the air before
> > midnight.  After sundown the Syracuse stations (with patterns that
> > generally protected stations in my direction from them) were
> > non-players, so the closest nighttime Top Pop stations I normally
> > tuned in were WKBW, WPTR, and WMEX.  During the day, my #1 choice was
> > the quite conservative Top 40 format and delivery of Syracuse's WFBL
> > "Big Six" announcers on 1390 kHz.
>
> When I was in high school, someone showed me a trick that works on
> most of the later-model 5-tube radios with miniature tubes and
> printed circuits.  I never could get it to work on the earlier 5-tube
> radios with larger tubes and hand-wired circuits, not could I do it
> with solid-state radios.
>
> What you would do was connect a length of wire, about two to three
> yards (shorter or longer didn't work as well) across the terminals of
> the loop antenna.  That would cause the radio to receive shortwave
> signals from about the  six to eleven megahertz bands. Reception
> wasn't great, but you could get the large broadcasters, such as the
> BBC, Swiss Radio International, Radio Deutsche Welle, and most of the
> Iron Curtain countries.  I did that for some time, in college and
> into law school until I got a regular shortwave radio.
>
> --

That reminds me of a reception trick I used to employ. I had a couple of old
tube shortwave radios, but neither had a BFO (beat frequency oscillator) for
single-sideband reception, and I wanted to hear hams and marine radio. So I
just put one radio next to another and tuned them a few hundred KHz apart
(455?). Voila, no more Donald Duck audio!

Howard