I'm fairly new to trying to liston to shortwave radio broadcasts.. I havn't really been able to get anything in on either of the radios I have that are capable of SW reception.... just get static.. well the boombox does get something, but it's really faint and easily lost.

When I still lived in Oregon my parents had a huge antenna up over the garage that we NEVER used... now I wish we had one to see if that would make it any better, but stupid neighborhood ordinances have a ban placed on such things.(also dissallow window mounted AC and satalite dishes on street sides of houses)

I just wonder if there's anything I can do or if I'm just boned.

You won't hear much during the day. Unless the radios have some sort of built-in antenna, you'll need at least 10' (preferably more) of wire to pick up something. I installed my longwire along the top roofline in my attic. 50' will get you quite a bit, including helping the AM broadcast band.

Let me know what kind of radio you're using.

Most everywhere from 4.5 MhZ to 10 MhZ-or MC- should offer good listening at night.There will be several places right in there that stations will literally on top of each other, other places where the radio will seem dead as a hammer...You;ll hear allsorts of strange sounds, incredibly distorted speech, & maybe even a Spanish woman rattling off numbers...Welcome to the wild, wacky world of shortwave. The strange sounds are likely to be hams talking to each other in Morse code, or some sort of some sort of encrypted data transmission, if it sounds "fast". The "Donald Duck" voices are hams again, talking to each other on sideband. The "numbers station" are purportedly spies receiving messages, altho OFFICIALLY no agency has ever confirmed this...We could tell you more, but we'd have to Terminate W/Extreme Prejudice...<grin>

These are the two radios I have that are capable of SW reception:

JVC PC100 boombox (http://www.thecowsaysmoo.org/superpsycho/Pictures/boombox/)
Columbia Portable(model?) (http://www.thecowsaysmoo.org/superpsycho/Pictures/thrift/june06/columbia/)

The Columbia radio has screws on back for external antennas.. the JVC boombox doens't, but I guess that couldn't keep me from hooking something up with aligator clips on the built in antenna?

At the moment someone is borrowing the columbia to liston to really bad music(well, ok, I just don't like what they like) on some FM station while they work on their car in the garage.

Uhh, no disrespect intended, but neither one of those are very primo-type shortwave radios. Check out this for about the best one you can buy-and its a 50-yr-old tube design...www.r390a.com ....

Check out this for about the best one you can buy-and its a 50-yr-old tube design...www.r390a.com ....

i have sandy many times :D

Unfortunately, as Sandy mentioned, those are not very good radios for shortwave listening. The Columbia would the the better of the two. Attach a piece of wire (10 feet will do fine) to the SW antenna connection, and attach another piece of wire to the G (Ground) connection, and connect the G wire to a cold water pipe.

Wait until later in the evening, 10 pm or so, and tune around 5.9 to 6.2 MHz. Whatever you hear is what you're capable of hearing with that radio.

Good luck!
Clay

I'm fairly new to trying to liston to shortwave radio broadcasts.. I havn't really been able to get anything in on either of the radios I have that are capable of SW reception.... just get static.. well the boombox does get something, but it's really faint and easily lost.

When I still lived in Oregon my parents had a huge antenna up over the garage that we NEVER used... now I wish we had one to see if that would make it any better, but stupid neighborhood ordinances have a ban placed on such things.(also dissallow window mounted AC and satalite dishes on street sides of houses)

I just wonder if there's anything I can do or if I'm just boned.
The FCC has made it quite clear that you CAN put up satellite dishes and local terrestrial television antennas as long as certain rules are met! In most cases the FCC regs overrule any others. Please go here:
http://www.fcc.gov/mb/facts/otard.html
for the straight poop. Note that longwires aren't covered, sad to say. But TV antennas and dishes ARE allowed!

Armed with the proper info, any neighborhood committee needs to prove to YOU that what they want overrules Uncle Sam!

Tom

I just wonder if there's anything I can do or if I'm just boned.

15 or 20 feet of any old wire strung behind the furnature in the room should be enough. Or string the wire thru the attic crawl space. You don't need to climb up into there, just tie a weigh of some sort to one end of the wire and toss it as far as you can (with the other end of the wire firmly tied to say a doorknob or such so it all doesn't sail into the attic!). I did that in apartments I rented to set up crude ham radio transciever shortwave antennas. Worked well enough for me to talk to someone in Antartica one day. Transmitters are much more fussy about antennas than receivers are...

Yeah, My stuff has an 80' wire strung out to yon tree on the far side of my lot, but, I also have a wire strung about 3/4 of the way around the ceiling, & quite frankly, it works ALMOST as well...

Uhh, no disrespect intended, but neither one of those are very primo-type shortwave radios. Check out this for about the best one you can buy-and its a 50-yr-old tube design...www.r390a.com ....

I wasn't assuming they were.http://www.thecowsaysmoo.org/superpsycho/Pictures/rkicons/rktoung.gif They're just all I have. The boombox cost me $7 and the columbia radio cost me $5. Most of my audio gear... well ok, all of my audio gear was bought at thrift stores and garage sales. I've never bought any peice of electronic equipment other than my main computer and a very *very* small percentage of my video games new.... I tend to go for old stuff and get it repaired when nessesary.

Well, I went through the boxes on my dad's workbench and found a big tangle of cheap speaker wire so I thought I'd just try to rig something temporary up to see if I could get anything

After I spent an hour with one end of the cable tied to the door handle of my car while I pulled the other end through loops and nots in the drive way I got it all neatly wrapped around a spool I found in the same box. Then I cut off about 35 feet or so... and another 6 feet....I took radio and put it in the window of an upstairs room... hooked the ground pin up to the screw on an electrical face plate with the 6 foot wire... hooked up the 35 foot cable to the SW screw and push-pinned(yeah, this is the high life here) it up the wall to the ceiling, around the room to the door, and along the hall untill the cable ran out...

When I turned the radio on I got lots of weird noises(which is more than what I got with no wire)... and that's about it.

I obviously am going to have to put more effort(...and more money...) into this if I'm going to get anywhere with this.

I just went and tried again.... I got some stuff... all in foreign languages... I think mostly spanish. I also found that if I keep my hand on the top of the radio, it sounds better, but that makes me tired standing there. .... there was one really odd one... I heard some lady talking but then there was this really deap moaning voice mixed in.

[QUOTE=SuperPsycho]I obviously am going to have to put more effort(...and more money...) into this if I'm going to get anywhere with this.

Nah, I've found many very capable portable and tabletop short waves at the thrift and flea markets in the 2-10 dollar range. Once you get the hang of knowing which bands are open at which time of day, you will find lots to listen to.

A full coverage receiver is best, usually 1.5 to 30Mhz, Radio Shack sold a ton of them in the 70's and 80's. Digital readout is helpful for the beginner, my first serious radio was a Realistic DX440. Most of the cheaper portables leave out large chunks of the band leaving not much more than the standard european broadcast bands - kinda boring.

The only antenna I am able to have here is a 30 ft. wire clamped to my balcony - it works fine, though not as good as a proper long wire.

Good luck, have fun

-Dave

Yeah, the DX-440 is a FINE radio...A Sony 2010 is another very good one, but they tend to get a little pricey... The Grundig Yacht Boy series are pretty good, & you might luck up & run acrost a Drake SW-8. Kenwood also makes SW stuff, a basic set of theirs is an R-600. I had an R-5000 several years back, & in certain ways I liked it better than the R-390As. An ICOM R-71 is a good SW set, along w/their R-7000, you can almost have "DC to Daylight" coverage. The R-7000 makes an EXCELLENT FM DXing set...

I've listened to shortwave for years...still love it...for more than 40 years now...used to have a world map over my bed as a kid with colored pins in it at all the points where I DXed and sent for and received QSL cards. Always had a simple little portable and an alligator clip, a flat insulated wire through the bottom of the screen and a bare copper wire to the nearest tree (and a ground arrestor). Just clip the wire onto the built in antenna at night and it's like looking through a powerful telescope of sound and the world of radio is out there!

Aside from crystal radios I built in my youth (in the 1960s), I think that I've only had 3 portable SW receivers and I currently have a Sony portable ICF SW-30 with digital presets and battery operated. I've taken it around the world with me (built in alarm and time zone clock too!). I'd love to have a great old SW receiver someday....ah someday.

A great site for reports on SW is Glenn Hauser's World Of Radio http://www.worldofradio.com/ . You can hear his broadcasts live on various SW stations (and even on WPKN in Bridgeport, CT 89.5 MHz on Saturday afternoons!).

Enjoy!

Here's a good link for info. BTW Sangean ATS-803A and Realistic DX-440 are the same radio.

http://www.dxing.com/index.html

- Dave

Hey, just thought I'd bump this to show something I found in a thrift store....

I think it's nice... I was able to sorta tune something in without any antenna(I don't have time to mess with it now.. should be in bed already! bad me.)
It's all clean and shiny and came with a zeroxed manual. The receiver was $9.99 and the matching speaker beside it was at the other end of the electronics department for $1.99

Cool, nice find - I have that one also. Fun to tune around the dial. Mine works well with 30 ft. of hookup wire thrown out the window. Can't say that I really understand how to work the bandpass tuning though.

- Dave

Now THAT reciever looks like something that should be able to tune in some stations... much more so than the two radios you previously mentioned!

I used to have an old Mackay Marine receiver that came from the radio room of a ship I used to work on... all I did was run a wire across the ceiling of my living room... and it picked up lots of SW broadcasts.

Aww, chit, Charlie, was that a big Tooob type MacKay ? If so, they're even more desirable than R-3XXs... A LOT more rare...You don't still have it, do you?

No, it was a solid state receiver... an early model digital readout tuner. The digits were made up of little tiny red dots instead of "segments" like today. Seems i recall the machine was dated 1974 or 75.

I gave the receiver to Kam quite some time back. He found the audio board inside was somewhat burned up... which surprised me... because I was listening to it before I sent it to him. It was a big larger than an old Pioneer stereo receiver... and HEAVY! I'm sure I have a photo of it around here somewhere. If I find it, I'll post it.

Hey, just thought I'd bump this to show something I found in a thrift store....

I think it's nice... I was able to sorta tune something in without any antenna(I don't have time to mess with it now.. should be in bed already! bad me.)
It's all clean and shiny and came with a zeroxed manual. The receiver was $9.99 and the matching speaker beside it was at the other end of the electronics department for $1.99
looks like you found a DX160a , i had one in the early 70s before the digital synthesized tuning receivers came down to affordable levels.you will get alot of good listening with that radio with a good longwire attached, if you have room try a wire 126 ft. long tapped @ 14% off the center for a good match on all the international shortwave bands, if you dont have that much room try 66 ft. with a wire attached at 14% off center. run the single wire to the ant terminal and attach the grd terminal to a good ground. you will be amazed at how much difference a properly tuned antenna will make.

I had a Radio Shack DX160 and enjoyed it very much. The dial was really cool looking! Just about any long wire antenna will get you international reception. It also has a BFO function so you can listen to single sideband a carrier wave transmissions (SSB & CW) fun to learn code on.
Radio shack still has an inexpensive copper wire antenna that can be strung outside or in your attic.