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Radio Australia: Another one bites the dust

re NOAA:
What do you do when there's no power? Your little smartphone won't function without a working cell phone antenna! Plus, some NOAA stations are receivable in areas where cell phone coverage is weak. Guessing that's why FM stations simulcast local TV during tornado warnings, but that isn't always the case in very rural areas.
 
crainbebo said:
re NOAA:
What do you do when there's no power? Your little smartphone won't function without a working cell phone antenna! Plus, some NOAA stations are receivable in areas where cell phone coverage is weak. Guessing that's why FM stations simulcast local TV during tornado warnings, but that isn't always the case in very rural areas.
Click to expand...

(Sarcasm on) It doesn't matter, it's so 20th Century, 80 years old ancient technology, everybody has wifi and cell phones now, who has a standalone weather radio anyway? (sarcasm off)

I sort of doubt NOAA will ever be turned off, but can see how some time in the future maybe the same arguments will be made. Everybody's got smart phones, blah blah blah.
 
CTListener said:
Haha. You brought back fond memories of my HQ-170. I had one because my main SWLing interest was the ham bands (I used a Zenith TransOceanic 3000-1 for broadcast) and loved it, but yes, it drifted long after it had warmed up. Many a cold winter night I spent listening to ragchewers on 75 and 40, their voices getting lower and lower and lower ...
Click to expand...

The OM and I had our own stations,both with HQ-170A's and both drifted like crazy.A guy on the Antique
Radio Forum says they had a bad run of silver mica caps in the oscillator section.He replaced them and said
his was rock-stable.
You remember the 6C4 in the oscillator...everyone had a stack of them and when cw sounded like spark it
was time to swap it out with a "rested" one.
One thing you had to admit,they were built like a tank.
The new guys will find all this rather quaint but that's how it was <grin>.
 
rtc said:
The OM and I had our own stations,both with HQ-170A's and both drifted like crazy.A guy on the Antique
Radio Forum says they had a bad run of silver mica caps in the oscillator section.He replaced them and said
his was rock-stable.
You remember the 6C4 in the oscillator...everyone had a stack of them and when cw sounded like spark it
was time to swap it out with a "rested" one.
One thing you had to admit,they were built like a tank.
The new guys will find all this rather quaint but that's how it was <grin>.
Click to expand...

For those of us SWLs who cut our teeth more in the solid state / transistor era we can relate if we had one of those single conversion marvels, the DX-160 and similar designs by other manufacturers.

Fun radios, and got the job done -- but there was a bit of drift, especially when tuning the ham bands. But SW bands also. MW -- not so much. DX-160's still make great MWDX machines.
 
rtc said:
Latest on the RA situation:

http://swling.com/blog/2017/02/continued-public-support-for-restoration-of-abc-shortwave-services/
Click to expand...

Interesting article and comments...

I wonder why a country like China doesn't take over the RA frequencies and dedicate some programming to the Australian Outback? They have the resources, and I'm sure the weather reports / warnings would not be an impossibility, as a lot of weather forecasting / reporting is drawn from satellites. I've heard the China Drive program on CRI before -- it's slick programming, and well done. They have the transmitters, and they're powerful enough. They probably could benefit from the positive PR. It would be a win-win all around. They could even hire some Oz announcers.

I'm not saying this to be flippant... I really think it would be an opportunity for CRI to fill a gap and help other people in other countries and get some positive PR from their good will in return.
 
I began with an analogue transister set, the Lafayette HA-600A, and I can tell you that their worst shortcoming was the lack of memory channels.
There were many times that I would be listening to a station coming in on multiple frequencies but the one to which I was tuned would fade into a bottomless pit.
Had I had twin receivers, I would have tuned each to one of the two best signals from the same transmitter site but on different bands.
To quote Nullsoft, frequency diversity reception still,
"Kicks the Llama's Ass".
 
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Garry Williams should be able to hear his ABC at night on their medium power, medium wave stations; I think they still exist.
 
tomservo said:
In Australia? Hundreds, maybe thousands.
Car radios with shortwave were sold for years in CB shops and truck stops down under from what I've been told.
Click to expand...
Wow, I wish I had known about that, how come this was not all over the boards I frequent?
Do you mean full coverage shortwave or just the highest day bands near CB?
 
ai4i said:
Wow, I wish I had known about that, how come this was not all over the boards I frequent?
Do you mean full coverage shortwave or just the highest day bands near CB?
Click to expand...

That I'm not sure of... I know there are some Panasonic and Blaupunkt models out three with general coverage but I don't know if that's what truckers use or not.

I think their CB radios are UHF anyway... The long distance truck trains probably use low band HF.
 
ai4i said:
Garry Williams should be able to hear his ABC at night on their medium power, medium wave stations; I think they still exist.
Click to expand...

I don't know where Garry Williams lives, but if he's far from a small Outback FM outlet, it will be his only option, and hopefully he has a really good MW radio, like a Superadio, CCRadio or PRD5.

Most of the powerful ABC 50 KW outlets are in the capital cities. Outside of the capital cities, it's all low power FM and AM, at least according to this list:
http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/frequency/

The "frequency finder" page on the ABC site is interesting. By just typing in a couple locations, you can get a small list of nearby ABC outlets, which show up on the Google map and you can see the coverage outlined in red. Most of the smaller outlets seem to be LPFM.

Knowing that Australian MWDXers get a lot of stations from other parts of their country, I'm guessing that some of the big city ABC MW outlets are audible in the Northern Territory and other Outback areas...

Maybe the Outback will see a surge in sales of CCRadios and PRD5's.

Just another example of why MW / AM band broadcasting is important.

PS -- from perusing the coverage map page, ABC Digital radio is only available in the five largest Capital cities. Of course, that's where most Australians live... but just sayin'. DAB was one of the reasons given for yanking the plug on the NT SW service.
 
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Thanks for the link which lead me here, but I need postal codes to see maps.
I would expect Oz to use higher power than the American and Canadian maximum, but the three countries are very similar.
In fact, they (Oz) even use 200KHz FM spacing, which no other countries outside the Americas do.
Even that power level should reach the center of the country at night from Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth, and Adelaide.
As for the sunlit daytime, CRI and RNZI still hold possibilities for long overland drives in the back, across the Outback.
 
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A major difference between when I was a young goat (a kid) and now is that back then, backbones used RF and end users were hard wired (twisted pairs), but today backbones are hard wired (fiber) and end users are on RF.
 
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Ai4i, you don't need a postal code with that map. Zoom in on the map and you'll see the communities, and then you can type in a name of a community. The map will give you a choice menu on the left, whether you are looking for ABC local radio, Radio National, etc. Then it will drop down a small list of nearby ABC outlets, and you select one and the outline of the coverage area will show on the Google map.

I typed in Lake Eyre the first time I tried the map, and nearby ABC outlets showed up. So even geographical points can be used.

And from looking at a couple large ABC outlets' Wikis on Wikipedia, the max for AM stations seems to be 50 KW. That's the power for 6WF in Perth, and 5AN in Adelaide (which has a fairly large coverage area) is 50 KW also.
 
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