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Favorite "Cheats" for Better Reception?

K

kenglish

Guest
Sometimes, DX'ing seems to work fine with a barefoot radio....just tuning around on the car radio, or kicking back with a beer in the back yard.
Other times, we need a little help.
What kinds of things do you do, to help get that distant station....and maybe even a nice QSL? Antennas? Location? Filters? Amplifiers? Do you monitor sunspot numbers? Tropo reports?
Pray for power outages?
Ever bought a new TV set or other less-RFI prone device for a neighbor?
 
DXMaps 50mhz map.
TVFM Skip Log.
WTFDA alerts.

Sometimes, traveling to the other side of the valley (i.e. east Kittitas, or west to Robinson Canyon) also can knock out some pests. Moses Lake is weak and Spokane is blocked on the east Kittitas side where I usually go out for once to twice-a-week walks on the railroad trail. I can also knock out some Yakima stations at the Manastash or Robinson hiking areas.
 
For AM and SW, it's just aligning the radio (and more recently the coupled loop) just so, tuning off by .1 or .2 or so on the ICF-2010. If I had fancier gear, I'd no doubt have fancier antennae and take more measures.

With analog TV (and a bit with FM), I've done everything from stand with one hand on rabbit ears set just so to get an e-skip ID (an audio ID of WCBS over WBBM video one of the better catches that way) to putting a tower in the back yard for UHF. And then there's satellite TV ...
 
I usually run my radios and antennas on batteries. I have a 35 Ah battery with PowerPole distribution, for the radio and ancillary devices, and have a separate 7 Ah battery just to supply the antenna amplifiers. The power lines in my area conduct RFI in to everything that's plugged in.
Also, I keep a large assortment of ferrites around.
 
Do any of you TV and FM DX'ers use separate antennas and phasing/nulling to separate out co-channel signals? I have a couple of sets of phasors and tunable FM filters (from the "TeleRadio News" guys in the UK). Now, if I can find the two 12-volt VHF amps that I bought from Micro-Circuits, I'd take a field trip with the new Eton radio.
 
I just use a tunable loop for AM. I have several, a Select-A-Tenna and a milk crate loop (about 1-2 db hotter). When I used to FM DX waaaay back when, I'd take the boombox with me in the car to a distant hillside that blocked the locals, and I could hear several stations from Vancouver, B.C. that way.
 
I experimented with a Rembrandt Rabbit Ear Antenna With 12 Position phasing and attenuation switch to create an interferometer with 2 Antennacraft/Archer FM-10. You could get some cochannels just by changing the switch position.

I built a small home made AM Loop which despite it's size worked quite well, with and without a modified Tom Kneitel preamp.

A few times and locations I had short verticals with the preamp and inductively coupled to my Sony Super Sensitive Portable.

Once I used a metal coat rack in a hotel room in the Keewenaw Peninsula, inductively connected to my Sony and grounded to the center screw in an outlet. I remember WIND and WNUS booming in on it.

In Mecosta County, MI, there were two 1330s, WHBL and WTRX, which were both strong enough to hear on the Delco Radio but interfered with each other. By parking in on the East facing front of a steel shopping center building, WTRX came in quite well Daytime without WHBL. (One of WTRX's claims to fame is that John Landecker had his first real open air Top 40 gig there in Summer, 1966 as "Dow Jones", in between his first and second years at MSU. It's in his book. It was also Wally Kennedy's first talk show gig after starting at another 1330, WEAW, after parlaying his appearance as a WLS Teenage Guest Disk Jockey to get the job at WEAW.)
 
I had my stereo receiver hooked up to my family's outdoor TV antenna, which was Radio Shack's best at the time, and through a booster. I could get FM stations from 100 miles away or more as long as there wasn't a closer station on the same frequency.
 
anotherguy said:
I had my stereo receiver hooked up to my family's outdoor TV antenna, which was Radio Shack's best at the time, and through a booster. I could get FM stations from 100 miles away or more as long as there wasn't a closer station on the same frequency.
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We had an FM Turnstile Antenna, with a four leaf clover pattern like the Batwing TV Transmitting Antennas, but marketed as nondirectional, but in 1969, after the stacking kit broke on our old TV antenna, we got an Allied Colorset 60 V-Log with an Alliance T-45 Rotator. Package deal at $39.99. On FM, it was better than the Turnstile on the low end of the dial, but noticeably worse, though directional, at the high end of the dial. On the straight element Log Periodics with High VHF Directors, the directors acted like wave traps at a certain FM frequency, and the gain would drop WAY down below 0 dB dipole gain at a certain frequency range on FM. If you saw the gain curve, it looked like a vortex at those frequencies.

 
Schroedingers Cat said:
We had an FM Turnstile Antenna, with a four leaf clover pattern like the Batwing TV Transmitting Antennas, but marketed as nondirectional, but in 1969, after the stacking kit broke on our old TV antenna, we got an Allied Colorset 60 V-Log with an Alliance T-45 Rotator. Package deal at $39.99. On FM, it was better than the Turnstile on the low end of the dial, but noticeably worse, though directional, at the high end of the dial. On the straight element Log Periodics with High VHF Directors, the directors acted like wave traps at a certain FM frequency, and the gain would drop WAY down below 0 dB dipole gain at a certain frequency range on FM. If you saw the gain curve, it looked like a vortex at those frequencies.

https://worldradiohistory.com/Archive-Catalogs/Allied-Catalogs/Allied-285-1969-Spring.pdf
Click to expand...

That antenna looks a lot like what we had from Radio Shack. I meant to mention that the setup we had also had a rotor since we were getting TV from different directions and it worked out really well unless my parents or brother were watching TV in one direction and I wanted to get an FM station in another.
 
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An antenna designed for VHF TV channels only would roll off quickly above the middle of the FM band. The longest elements are cut for channels 2-4 and their third harmonics are for channels 7-13, shorter elements are for channels five and six, but there is a steep roll-off between channels six and seven.
 
A half wave director at 7-13 is a quarter wave at FM. It's like a 1/4 wavelength transmission line trap, but the transmission line traps are shorter due to a lower velocity factor. The V-Shaped elements on the V-Logs increase the gain at 7-13 and improve the pattern. If you see the gain curve for the straight element log with VHF directors, you'll see it. I don't know if David's site has anything with those graphs. The gain does fall off gradually over FM on the typical V-Log. One antenna was designed with break off elements to improve FM performance. Antennacraft apparently used both designs over the years for their Radio Shack antennas.
 
Yes, my V-log did have a tighter front lobe on channels 7-13 than my regular LP,
even though the standard one had more elements and was longer and newer.
I would like to see an FM Yagi with V'd elements cut for 29-36 MHz (third harmonic).
 
At one point in college, I was on the third floor of a three-story building. I mounted a radio on top of a bookshelf so that it abutted a steel roof beam. Worked like a charm for pulling in weak signals.
 
When I was in graduate school, I had a carrel to use for studying in the basement of a six story building. I would put the radio next to the copper standpipe that apparently went all the way to the roof. I would work through my homework in Advanced Calculus, and to stay awake, I listened to John Landecker on WLS late at night. It boomed in late at night on my inductively coupled antenna, "Boogie check, boogie check, oooh, aaah..." Also one night I heard KY58, "doesn't it sound great", booming in. CKY must have been on Night Pattern. I called Art Vuolo and asked if he knew the station, and at the time he wasn't familiar with what it was. That's how long ago it was, a few years before his WLS Rock Guide.
 
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Schroedingers Cat said:
When I was in graduate school, I had a carrel to use for studying in the basement of a six story building. I would put the radio next to the copper standpipe that apparently went all the way to the roof. I would work through my homework in Advanced Calculus, and to stay awake, I listened to John Landecker on WLS late at night. It boomed in late at night on my inductively coupled antenna, "Boogie check, boogie check, oooh, aaah..." Also one night I heard KY58, "doesn't it sound great", booming in. CKY must have been on Night Pattern. I called Art Vuolo and asked if he knew the station, and at the time he wasn't familiar with what it was. That's how long ago it was, a few years before his WLS Rock Guide.
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CKY kept calling itself "KY58" (with jingles containing that slogan) right up until it migrated/morphed to FM.
 
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