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Digital radio mondiale!

I used to live in central Shelby County, Alabama, about 20 miles from the EWTN complex of transmitters in Vandiver. Depending on what band they were broadcasting on, I either heard a weak but steady signal or nothing at all! I even drove out to the antenna site, which is up on a mountain and very secluded. Even within eyesight of the massive system they have, I didn't have much in the way of signal on the active frequencies. But that was with a portable radio, antenna barely extended, inside a car. My best local reception was on the few frequencies above 20 MHz that they used; I don't know if they still employ such high frequencies or not, but those were much more like local AM signals, albeit still surprisingly weak, considering.

Now, I live about 280 miles south of their site, and no matter what channel they're on, if it's being beamed my way (towards S. America or the Caribbean) it's almost always so strong I have to attenuate.
 
jowijo said:
I've always been curious, how does local shortwave reception work? Say you're close to a 2KW or 50KW shortwave station, is the signal stable like MW or is it still fade-prone and weird like in distant reception?
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Local SW reception is generally achieved by using the 3.3 and 4.8-5.0 mHz bands. This used to be very common in Latin America as well as much of Africa and Indonesia, etc.

Using moderate power... anywhere from 100 watts to 10 kw... these stations provide both local service and a regional service day and night in the areas in and surrounding a city... often several hundred miles out with power in the higher range. In many cases, going back 50 years or so, a station might be only on short wave with no medium wave simulcast.

At least in Latin America as smaller cities got local AMs and then as FM grew, shortwave became less viable. I had a license for 590 AM and a channel around 3.3 mHz for my HCSP1 in Quito, Ecuador. It came with the station, which I moved from a small rural town 70 km from Quito and was useful in that area. But I never lit it up because I could not see a profit in it when I got it in 1966.

Usual antenna for local service SW was some form of a center-fed longwire, often with a modified curtain design if they had enough height. The one I bought was only about 30 meters high, and was a center fed quarter wave dipole. It was hung from two large tree trunks.
 
K6JHU said:
I used to listen to the CBC Northern Service on 9.650, Willis Conover on VOA, CFRX and CHNX on 49 meters, and 'Rock of the World' out of NOLA. Where should I be tuning now, because I haven't heard anything listenable (program-wise) in a long time.
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I have found Europe has much more interesting programming if you use online tuners like http://websdr.ewi.utwente.nl:8901/

But by the time you do that, you might as well just stream the stations live on the internet and not deal with the fading.
 
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