Hello to all of you ! Last night due to the poor conditions on both MW and SW bands, I decided to do some work with the wire.
I cut with my scissors piece of a broken headphone and I placed the short amount of its wire inside of it to the long-wire I had. Then, I connected it to the headphone jack of some CD player's speakers I had with the encoding cable (the one I use to transfer some of my DX and some of the music I taped from the radio into real-audio) connected to the speakers and the wires's terminals were standing right on one of the end of the encoding cable. The other end was obviously connected to the radio, not too much, because otherwise I would have extreme attenuation of signals, but in the position where the most gain could be obtained. Connecting the long-wire I have in our interior yard right into the radio is pretty tough and mostly I either do not have enough gain, get extreme overload, get some overload enough everywhere below 4.76 MHz and some higher like on 6010. Now, while I'm still plagued by overload on the botton of 60 meters and below, I get nothing bad on 6010 with still quite some gain over the telescopic antenna of my Sangean CST-818 alone and the rest of the 60 meters band above 4760 is as nice as one could get. I'm also looking forward trying some Peruvians, as it is a country from which I never positively identified something yet. In spite of seeing a DXer in Northern Germany with what I believe was trans-arctic DX (several west coast stations on MW), condx here were lousy on both MW and SW. For exemple, on 49 meters, I couldn't get at all Radio Educación which is a station both me and Geroge Maroti qualifies as non-DX. At least, with this little work on my antenna system, I heard some weak, but new for me signals like on 4910, I think (very weak, with apparent Spanish) or 4810 which would be a nice Mexican (didn't note anything down), 6125 (probably HCJB which was clearer and without neighborhood QRM). Radio Rebelde 5025 was more pleasant to listen to only very late last night, but way much clearer with this new improovement on the way my long-wire was connected. On MW, Latins were extremely poor. Only RVC-530 and even them were only fair to good at times. Rebelde poor on all the frequencies. 600 had short-skip WICC dominating instead of Radio Rebelde in the Holguin area. 670 had Rebelde way under a tiring growl from our neighborhood. No TA MW DX and not even CKEC-1320 or CKAT-600. Of course, I was visiting friends in the very early part of the evening, so I may have missed sunset enhancement on CKEC-1320 and other interesting Maritime targets theoritically, but pratically even later last night the channel of 1320 had mostly weak US stations from presumably even shorter haul distances than CJMR Mississauga which was VERY messy (and the CJMR is a pest for me !). On 1330, I had the Boston station with, since several months, Haitian programming instead of Spanish tropical and pops. I wonder when they changed the format. The only noteworthy DX was hearing Quebecor rigodon on 800 under semi-nulled CJAD for my clearest reception of Quebec City yet. There is a place, where CJAD can almost be completly nulled, but CHRD faded out at the time. A short-skip signal like it would have been present with continuous signal just to illustrate how poor the conditions were for both foreign and domestic DX. I initially thank that the auroral zone, due to the pretty recent geomagnetic activity, extends farther south here, than in Europe, but I'm not sure wherever this is plausible, since the German DXer was actually hearing stations from my own country. And hearing Vancouver and Seattle in Germany requires quite a bit in the way of propagation assistance and the retirment of the auroral zone. But nothing, just weak slops when I tuned at the middle of the distances between CFRA/residual WTAG-580 and CKRS-590. On FM, while working on my antenna system, I had tropo-scatter from Trois Rivières on 93.9 and Ottawa (CBOF-90.7 and also 93.9). Still not even the faintest trace of skip, but of course the mini-Es season related to the summer peak in the Southern Hemisphere is not much of a thing here up north. When I was a member of the WTFDA, Mike Bugaj told me the same thing. Maybe southern TX, Central America or Venezuela have some in the way of Sporadic-Es at this time of the year. Of course, southern Venezuela gets Es every day, because of it's proximity to the equator and diurnal Es available during the daylight hours at weak levels. I'm still thinking if Venezuela, at least the northern part of it, is well placed for evening TEP or too close to the equator so that both the afternoon TEP and evening TEP signals skip over it. But something as far as FM DX goes is was anyone able to tell that near the magnetic pole, during the polar nights, Es is permanently received in the same way diurnal Es happens in the equatorial regions ? Are there at least some stations in the barely populated areas of northern Russia or northern Norway ? Are there, on the web, any results about nocturnal Es ? Finally, I think we will install the Yagi antenna this spring. When we transported it from friends I have in the Labelle region in the Laurentians area, one element of it broken, but it would be a great antenna. In spite of going very late to bed last night, I woke quite early this morning, way before 10 o'clock. Since Mexico is also a favorite target of mine, I still hope I will enter in a normal schedule of sleep and going to bed early for waking very early in order to get Radio Mil 6010 and others. XEHHI-640 is high on my wanted list, but the right aurora will be in order for me to be able to get them. With CJAD nulled to the WSW bearing, XEROK whould be bringed with little trouble too, during the right conditions. Hoping that conditions will get much better tonight on the MW and SW bands, be the good DX stuff with you ! Bogdan Chiochiu QTH: Pierrefonds, QC ---[Start Commercial]--------------------- World Radio TV Handbook 2006 is out. Order yours from http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0823059367/hardcoredxcom/ ---[End Commercial]----------------------- ________________________________________ Hard-Core-DX mailing list Hard-Core-DX@hard-core-dx.com http://arizona.hard-core-dx.com/mailman/listinfo/hard-core-dx http://www.hard-core-dx.com/ _______________________________________________ THE INFORMATION IN THIS ARTICLE IS FREE. It may be copied, distributed and/or modified under the conditions set down in the Design Science License published by Michael Stutz at http://dsl.org/copyleft/dsl.txt