With spring just around the corner, if you're looking for the perfect antenna to add to your shack, this just might be the thing. After all, it is legal in all 50 states.

Posted 04:21 UTC

Alan Johnson, NASWA's equipment maven, passes along the news that "there is an interesting series of articles in the February and March issues of QST about utilizing a receiver's passband tuning, IF shift, attenuator and RF gain controls to minimize noise and interference. The articles have excellent graphical representations of the effects of altering these controls. From what I can tell the articles are not available on line but most libraries should have QST." So turn off your computer and go to the library!

Posted 17:16 UTC

Sun flips magnetic field: "'This always happens around the time of solar maximum,' NASA physicist David Hathaway said in a statement. 'The magnetic poles exchange takes places at the peak of the sunspot cycle. In fact, it's a good indication that Solar Max is really here.'"

Posted 19:28 UTC

Merlin Communications, the people who provide transmission services for BBC World Service, has placed a PDF file of the speech "The Resurgence of Shortwave" on their site. The speech was given by Rory Maclachlin, Merlin's Commercial Director, at a conference in South Africa back in October. The file is only 52 KBytes, and it's a good read. (Thanks Rich Cuff for the pointer.)

Posted 16:52 UTC

WORLDWIDE DX CLUB Weekly Top News 506 for February 11, 2001, compiled by Wolfgang Büschel, has been posted.

Posted 04:23 UTC

Clay Shirky on Michael Powell's radical plans for the FCC: "The FCC has an astonishing amount of regulatory power, derived from a single law, the Telecommunications Act of 1934.... Michael Powell, if his recent speeches before bodies like the Freedom Forum and the Media Institute are any guide, intends to obliterate the 1934 Act."

Somehow I doubt this will extend to actually allowing things like Low Powered FM and legalizing pirate radio....

Posted 04:21 UTC

It's DX season, and time for those wacky Finns to trek to the middle of nowhere, specifically a place called Lemmenjoki that has a permanent DX cottage with tons of antennae pointed in every direction. Esa Hänninen has a page that focuses on current occupants and what they're hearing. I understand that North American mediumwave stations are coming in by the bucketful between 2100 UTC and 1500 UTC. Need some background? Mika Mäkeläinen has a nice page explaining why these DXers drive almost 1000 kilometers to the middle of nowhere. Or you can see the excellent video report that Mika did for CNN in RealMedia format. When you're done with that, you could listen to the excellent documentary that Jonathan Marks did for Media Network a few years ago about Lemmenjoki entitled "In Search of Distant Signals". [MP3 format, Real Audio G2, WRN archive for other formats] (Thanks to Patrik Willför for reminding me about Lemmenjoki, where he'll be spending the next week.)

Posted 00:17 UTC

Media Network has posted a review of Willi Passman's Tropical Bands List publication, which is now available electronically for a significantly reduced price. I bought a couple of copies of it a few years ago and found it was an excellent publication, very accurate.

Posted 20:29 UTC

Andy Sennitt at Radio Netherlands has been making a fuss lately, but it's about a very important issue. Trials are set to begin in Germany for communications over powerlines. The frequencies to be use run from 9 kHz to 30 MHz; yep, that's right, the entire mediumwave and shortwave spectrum. You think your computer and DSL modem cause a mess.... This is a potential disaster for the entire international broadcasting community, SWLs, DXers, broadcasters, the whole lot. And you know if they start doing this in one country, they'll do it in others. So, particularly if you're in Germany, but even if you're not, check out the page on the Media Network site about this.

Posted 02:50 UTC

Ed Mayberry's got another sprawling issue of International Listener posted.

Posted 02:37 UTC

I know that this technically doesn't have much if anything to do with radio (aside that it came from a satellite), but I think it's amazing and wanted to share it, and if there's a better illustration of which parts of the world are developed and which parts aren't, I haven't seen it.

Posted 02:34 UTC

Si Ud. leer Español, se puede visitar las paginas de Radio Enlace, la programma DXista del servicio Español de Radio Nederland. But even if you don't read Spanish, you might want to visit to see a picture of the simultaneously ever-elusive and omnipresent Glenn Hauser. I wonder if Alfonso and Jaime, the hosts, speak English and would be able to do an English language version....

Posted 18:48 UTC