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In Reply to: RE: Does anyone here at the Vintage Asylum listen to Shortwave? posted by Brian McGowan on July 01, 2009 at 14:08:34
The Drake is a nice receiver. I used to be an avid SW listener - as a kid with a homemade Heathkit receiver, I was a member of the Radio Australia Listener's Club, and always enjoyed getting mail from Radio Peking (the bennies from sending in QSL cards :-) As an adult I could afford "better" rigs (Icom, Kenwood, even a JRC), but none was as much fun as that old Heathkit.
I am not sure that connecting your Drake to a hi fi system is a good idea. What I think you'll find is it reproduces all the noise in SW reception, much of which is outside the voice band and only serves to interfere with your listening. What actually may work better is a speaker that is tuned to emphasize the mid frequencies - i.e., voice - or a narrowband filter on the receiver's output to filter out the noise before it gets to your amp. I know JRC used to make such a speaker, and I have to imagine that other ham radio manufacturers do too. You may decide the speaker in the Drake is good enough, which certainly simplifies things :-)
As for an antenna, since you won't be transmitting, you can experiment with almost anything. If your building is steel and concrete, don't expect much from an indoor antenna, but the only way you'll know is to experiment. Try stretching your antenna wire horizontally, perpendicular to the direction the signals will be coming from (typically in the US that means the wire is stretched north-south). Try moving it around and reorienting it - international broadcasters often lease transmitter space geographically near their target audience, so the signal may not actually come from the the direction of the originating country. You can also try mounting it vertically - it may not pick up signals with as much strength, but it may pick them up from more directions.
I wouldn't bother with an antenna amplifier - your Drake is sensitive enough that it'll make the most of what comes out of the antenna, and an amplifier will only serve to increase RF noise and possibly overload your receiver's front end.
I used to really enjoy listening to SW - I've been meaning to take one of my radios out of storage and get back into it, and maybe now I will. I'm a licensed ham, too, but listening comes more naturally to me than talking - it's just my personality - so being an SWL (shortwave listener) has always been fun to me. And who knows - you may get bitten by the bug and decide to go for your ham license. (Since the FCC got rid of the morse code requirement, it's much easier than it used to be to get on the air.)
It has always been fun for me too listening to Shortwave as well as distant AM stations,but then I got lazy when I found out I could listen to
the BBC and other world stations on the internet along with many AM stations such as WLW,WCCO,WLS,etc! But now that I'll be getting what I have been told is 1 of the best Multiband Recievers of all time and in near mint condition,I'm starting to get excited again in listening to Shortwave once more the old fashion way!Brian
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