Topic: say have you looked at these wacky gizmos lately, these radio wave receiving devices

boof started this discussion 1 month ago #125,682

The vast majority are now made with tuner-on-a-chip you could say, DSP - digital signal processing, instead of the long-standing analogue tuner. Even if the user interface is the sliding dial, the underlying tuning is digital. Pretty much all of the radios are now Chinese manufacture.

Anonymous B joined in and replied with this 1 month ago, 58 seconds later[^] [v] #1,360,972

boof (OP) replied with this 1 month ago, 15 minutes later, 16 minutes after the original post[^] [v] #1,360,978

dang, I'd like to know which side of the family that came from

Anonymous B replied with this 1 month ago, 5 minutes later, 22 minutes after the original post[^] [v] #1,360,979

@previous (boof)

boof (OP) replied with this 1 month ago, 1 minute later, 23 minutes after the original post[^] [v] #1,360,980

Anyway, there's all manner of gimmicks that some radios have, and some of the cheapest shit boxes have the most gimmicks. Sometimes the higher end ones have a gimmick or two. Anyway gimmicks can be anything from a fucking built-in LED emergency light to a god-damn spirit level attached to the side. Like, what the fuck.

(Edited 1 minute later.)

Oatmeal Fucker !BYUc1TwJMU joined in and replied with this 1 month ago, 16 hours later, 17 hours after the original post[^] [v] #1,361,176

@previous (boof)

So you know if you need to adjust your floor

Meta joined in and replied with this 1 month ago, 15 minutes later, 17 hours after the original post[^] [v] #1,361,177

Yes my dear fellow! I do indeed count myself amongst the lucky number those of whoms’t own a wireless receiver.

Anonymous E joined in and replied with this 1 month ago, 17 minutes later, 17 hours after the original post[^] [v] #1,361,183

I want a radio that is a handheld black rectangle with a built in speaker and is chargeable with USB C

Meta replied with this 1 month ago, 15 minutes later, 17 hours after the original post[^] [v] #1,361,185

@previous (E)
In the old days many Motorola phones, dumb and smart, included a radio capable of demodulating and amplifying the baseband signals which had been transmitted on the Armstrong system, also known as “FM” or Frequency Modulation. This was invokable via a software application which used a headphone cable (in those days true wireless headphones were the stuff of a madman’s dreams) as an antenna for the wireless.

(Edited 38 seconds later.)

Anonymous F joined in and replied with this 1 month ago, 38 minutes later, 18 hours after the original post[^] [v] #1,361,191

The gimmicks are there to dazzle 80 year olds. A radio that beeps SOS isn't a help to anyone.

boof (OP) replied with this 1 month ago, 5 hours later, 23 hours after the original post[^] [v] #1,361,291

I made some notes about what the available stuff has of interest.
features: receiving LW, MW (AM), FM, SW, SSB, air band, weather band (for North American use)
replaceable batteries, buttons that light up, bass and treble knobs, display shows plenty of
information at once such as frequency and time, RDS (for display of songs playing on FM station),
line out, external antenna jacks (screw, 3.5mm, SMA, spring clips, BNC), chuff-free tuning (no soft
muting, PLL circuit would fix that, in Tecsuns listed here), tuning finely 1 kHz increment on MW
(AM), adjustable bandwidth of tuned frequency available for all bands, easy tuning mode (ETM, found
on some Tecsuns to auto-scan for new stations without resetting any stored in memory), fine tuning
of SSB (no BFO method, in the Tecsuns listed here), synchronous AM/MW&SW, signal overload
prevention, play and record audio files on SD card and USB stick, line in jack

boof (OP) double-posted this 1 month ago, 12 minutes later, 1 day after the original post[^] [v] #1,361,307

Now a bit more about the bands of receiving. Maybe you'd like a good radio for local stations and that's it. Or, maybe you'd like to pull in distant MW (AM) stations. They call that DXing, where DX is radio jargon for distance. Some radios will have a switch or button to toggle setting for DX for if you want to boost hearing weak signals. Maybe you want shortwave for stations of distant lands. But not USA anymore, the current regime killed Voice of America and left the field open to the Chinese and Russian biased stations. Well there's still Radio Indonesia. OK, maybe you like stereo sound for FM stations and would want a particularly good speaker or even pair of speakers, or line out jack to allow connection to good speakers. Then there's listening to hams and citizen band signals. Air band for listening to airport communications. For more specialized stuff like emergency services or police, you'd instead go for a sophisticated radio scanner, they call them, keeping in mind that even then, much of the stuff has gone encrypted. About FM -- in Europe and Africa and in Australia and New Zealand, it spans from 87.5 to 108 megahertz - also known as VHF Band II - while in the Americas it ranges from 88 to 108 MHz -- not all devices account for that. USA has weather band for continuous weather reporting (until the regime kills it), and Canada uses the same band for the purpose. Oh, and for use in different areas of the world, 9/10 kHz selectable MW steps.

The size of the radio -- if you imagine travelling the world, you'd consider that in addition to what frequency bands you might want to access.

(Edited 25 minutes later.)

boof (OP) triple-posted this 1 month ago, 14 minutes later, 1 day after the original post[^] [v] #1,361,325

@1,361,183 (E)
That sounds a lot like XHDATA/SIHUADON D-808 which uses 18650 battery. Small portable that is more expensive than cheap crap, but not in the hundreds like higher end stuff can go for.
https://swling.com/blog/2021/05/dan-revisits-the-venerable-xhdata-d-808-portable-radio/

oh earlier about FM bands, I meant that radios might not deal with how in some countries, the FM broadcast band starts from 64 MHz, nevermind that other distinction

(Edited 26 minutes later.)

boof (OP) quadruple-posted this 1 month ago, 1 week later, 1 week after the original post[^] [v] #1,363,755

Heads up, the Eton company has liquidated their stock of the Eton Elite Executive. Several US based sellers on eBay that sell to many countries of the world have some of that stock starting at about 50 US clams, not including the shipping cost. The radio was ordinarily priced about triple to quadruple that much. There had been rumoar in 2020 of a newer model coming along to replace, but that is uncertain years later, though discontinuations often precede a new model (and sometimes it's because a part or parts are no longer available). Anyhow, it is a generally well regarded travelling sized radio. A drawback is the one that is pretty standard for radios these days -- if you like to turn the knob to explore along a radio band, the sound cuts out as you move and you need to wait a bit to hear again. People call that chuffing, and it is more formally called soft muting. The other common defect is the sync feature, where when activated is supposed to lock into weak drifting MW (AM) and other bands signals, is not really there. Like it sucks enough that they should not have pretended to have the feature. Most radios that say they have this feature don't really. The Tecsun 680 is a reported exception in this class of radios. Otherwise the features are pretty good for the discount price certainly.
reviews
https://www.blogordie.com/2023/05/eton-elite-executive-product-review/
https://radiojayallen.com/eton-elite-executive-am-fm-sw-air-radio/

(Edited 3 minutes later.)

Oatmeal Fucker !BYUc1TwJMU replied with this 1 month ago, 17 minutes later, 1 week after the original post[^] [v] #1,363,759

@previous (boof)

50 mcnuggets on a pocket radio in 2024?

boof (OP) replied with this 1 month ago, 15 minutes later, 1 week after the original post[^] [v] #1,363,760

@previous (Oatmeal Fucker !BYUc1TwJMU)
well it is bigger than a pocket of ordinary clothing

Anyway some reddit guy bled out a load of explaining what the fuck is soft muting, and some related terminology:
https://www.reddit.com/r/shortwave/comments/adinvr/whats_the_point_of_softmute_in_a_shortwave_radio/

(Edited 6 minutes later.)

boof (OP) double-posted this 1 month ago, 4 days later, 2 weeks after the original post[^] [v] #1,364,415

Let me tell you some more about radio bands that you might want to listen. Perhaps the least familiar are the longwave LW and the single side band SSB. So what the hell broadcasts on longwave -- used to be more stations, less so now, much less than shortwave which has plenty of decline in the world itself. Wiki says: "Non-directional beacons transmit continuously for the benefit of radio direction finders in marine and aeronautical navigation. They identify themselves by a callsign in Morse code." And there are time signals. "There are institutional broadcast stations in the range that transmit coded time signals to radio clocks." Also, communication to submarines, and amateur radio.

(Edited 1 minute later.)

boof (OP) triple-posted this 1 month ago, 1 day later, 2 weeks after the original post[^] [v] #1,364,642

Now the single sideband SSB. Not really a band of its own, it is a method or mode of transmission, like how AM and FM are methods but not technically defined as the bands they are employed upon. SSB is pretty much another AM method. The SSB method is based on how ordinary transmission is not really a of single frequency but is three that has the named frequency in the middle with modulated frequencies on each side. So some of the band is below and some is above that middle, and we refer to these sidebands as upper and lower sidebands. The SSB transmission method broadcasts only one of LSB or USB, and so that is why we call it single sideband.

For a radio that lets you hear SSB, you may have to fiddle with tuning a BFO, beat frequency oscillator after you locate a transmission. As you get the tuning better, the sound turns less peculiarly distorted. Some radios don't require this BFO tuning of you, and may just have a button to choose either of upper or lower sideband and you can tune around on whichever.

"by agreements worldwide, all stations transmitting SSB use LSB on 160 meters through 75 meters, USB on 60 meters, back to LSB on 40 meters and then all bands above 40 meters use USB" The typically usage is amateur radio (ham) where people talk back and forth. Also utility bands, air traffic, marine, numbers stations, pirate radio.

Here's some explanation:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBy21asFoDU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2UHzr_uMeo

Minichan