A Mythbuster Special: IT9RYH
10. A well known game developer pulled the plug on “Finding Nino”.
Confirmed. The game wasn’t challenging enough. Almost every player found him immediately on 14.195 MHz.
9. Yaesu is one of the biggest sponsors of Nino.
Confirmed. Although Yaesu officials frantically try to deny this, the evidence is compelling. Almost every Yaesu stock photo shows 14.195 MHz in the display.
8. Icom is trying to take over Yaesu’s sponsorship.
Confirmed. Icom company officials were clearly embarrassed when I contacted them, and quickly switched over to deny mode. The frequency displayed in recent stock photos, they said, was a chosen randomly. Really. Read our lips.
7. His official call sign was not IT9RYH.
Plausible. According to some, the issued call sign was originally India Delta One Oscar Tango, but he managed to bribe a few officials to get it changed.
6. Nino is a valued customer of SteppIR.
Busted. A SteppIr is pointless when you use one single frequency.
5. There is a IT9RYH fanclub.
Plausible. This might be a secret society, searching Google generated just 43 (quite sketchy) results.
4. There seems to be a picture of his next rig somewhere on the Internet.
Confirmed.
3. There seems to be a picture of his next Yagi somewhere on the Internet.
Confirmed.
2. The IT9RYH soap will continue in 2012.
Confirmed. Nothing will change. Sorry.
1. When I look at this post, you must be really bored.
Confirmed! Merry Christmas everyone, and a happy new year!
The shortest day, 10 meters still going strong
Five days ago I switched over to the mobile version of the Albrecht, because I want to make some small modifications to the internal power supply of the AE497W. KQ2H was fine today, but yesterday it was another story. The signal didn’t exceed S5, and I had a hard time getting into the repeater system. This was the display of the Albrecht AE485S:
KQ2H only S3 on average, a far cry from the 9+10dB I was used to.
Today everything was back to normal. Looking forward to more sunspots, a higher flux and the longest day!
Review Tecsun PL-310
I’m probably more of a listener than a ham. Many of my antennas are dedicated to listening, not transmitting. Receivers outnumber transmitters by a factor of 2. In spite of modern technologies such as satellite and the Internet, listening to shortwave stations is alive and kicking. While it is great to sit behind a professional desktop receiver connected to excellent outdoor antennas, I don’t always want to spend a large part of the day in the shack.
As my old Aiwa SW portable started to die, I went online to check out the current breeds of portable SW radios. One of the brands I ran into, was Tecsun. The models were so cheap that I could buy a truckload of them and still keep some of the the money I reserved for replacing the Aiwa. After reading (sometimes raving) reviews elsewhere, I ordered three models: the PL-310, the PL-390 and the PL-660. This is the first review in the Tecsun series and covers the cheapest of the lot, the PL-310. I bought mine here.
Tecsun PL-310
In the box:
The radio, three rechargeable batteries, soft pouch, earphones, USB charger / power supply. Note: other sellers will ship an external wire antenna instead of a USB charger. Compare the extras each seller offers before buying.
Look & Feel
Measuring only 141(W) X 87(H) X 30(D) mm, this radio will slide into your pocket easily. It is thoughtfully designed, beautiful even, and all the buttons and knobs are 
exactly in the right place. The amber LCD gives more information than you can dream of: frequency, time, bandwidth, signal strength (in dBµ!), signal-to-noise ratio, temperature (in Celsius or Fahrenheit), battery type, charge indicator, battery level, and the time you want the alarm to go off. The LCD illumination can either be temporary or continuous, an option I never saw before.
Connections
At the right side of the radio you will find the tuning and the volume knobs. Both are driving opto couplers, so no crackling pots to worry about. At the left side you will find two 3.5mm connections for a stereo headphone and an external antenna. There’a also a USB connector present, which can only be used to power the radio and/or charge the three NiMH AA cells this radio uses. The type of batteries (standard or rechargeable) can be selected from the front panel. This will not only prevent problems, but will also display the right battery level.
Basic specifications
The PL-310 is designed around the Silicon Labs Si4734 chip, which basically is a complete DSP receiver in one small package. All Tecsun had to do was to link it to an audio amplifier, buttons and knobs, a display and such and voilá, one working radio! Brilliant. For more specs you can go to the end of this post and download the manual.
The frequency range is as follows: LW: 153 – 513 KHz, MW: 520 – 1710 KHz, SW: 2300 – 21950 KHz, FM: 64 – 108 MHz. The desired MW spacing, 9 or 10 KHz, is user selectable. When set at 10 KHz, which is the norm in the USA, the temperature will be automatically displayed in Fahrenheit instead of Celsius. The integrated DSP is nothing short of amazing. When listening to SW stations, the bandwidth can be set to 6, 4, 3, 2 or 1 KHz. As this is not an audio DSP but a ‘real’ IF DSP, this thing really works. Splatter and such can be filtered out with ease, and easily defeats some of the desktop receivers I own.
Tuning
Tecsun offers more than one way of tuning. One of them is, of course, tuning manually. The second option is entering a frequency by using the keypad. The third way is to let the Tecsun itself find all the stations. This system, dubbed ATS (Automatic Tuning System), will find all stations within the selected band and store them into memory. After scanning, the tuning knob will enable you to quickly switch from station to station. Similar systems in other radios often failed miserably, as they couldn’t distinguish noise from real signals. Tecsun got it right this time though, and it’s a blessing when listening to shortwave. Just after the hour, when stations come and go, I let the Tecsun scan again, after which the old memory contents are overwritten with active stations.
Something to get used to is the way Tecsun implemented manual tuning. When you rotate the tuning knob fast, the radio will skip frequencies by the standard channel spacing (e.g. 9 KHz on MW, 5 KHz on SW). When rotating slowly, the radio will tune one KHz at the time. It proved to be very challenging to get the rotation speed just right.
Performance LW, MW
When you buy this radio, you will quickly discover that LW is disabled by default. This seems odd, but as it turns out there’s a reason for that: on LW this radio is as deaf as a post. Even a reasonably strong station such as the BBC (198 KHz) is hardly noticeable. As the external antenna input only serves FM and SW, connecting a long wire won’t help. On MW the performance is quite good though. Sensitivity is above average, and the selectivity is excellent. AM 747, the strongest MW transmitter here, and located very close to me, didn’t manage to overload the receiver. Note: the to-be-reviewed-later Tecsun PL-660 did collapse completely.
Performance FM, SW
On FM, this radio is excellent. Not much else to tell here. Period. On SW, especially with an external wire antenna connected to the radio, the performance is much better than one would expect from a small package like this. Only one thing is slightly annoying: the hard coded (and sometimes completely wrong) frequency range of SW bands. 41 meters, for example, starts at 7.1MHz instead of 7.2Mhz (in effect since March 29, 2009). Bottom line: tuning manually is a must now and then. Many stations transmit outside these outdated and limited ranges embedded in the Silicon Labs chip.
Audio quality
The audio quality is a pleasant surprise. You can turn up the volume without any distortion, and the frequency spectrum is better than any other similar sized radio I ever owned. Great stereo sound on FM too, when using a headphone.
Conclusion
For less than $45, you get an amazing piece of technology; the price/performance ratio is off the scale. A nice touch is the inclusion of the 4 meters band, which is already available to hams in some countries. The Tecsun PL-310 is not perfect though. The radio is completely deaf on LW, uses outdated or limited SW ranges, and manual tuning can be challenging.
EMC and LED light
When LED lights came available, they were expensive. They were outperformed by a simple flashlight running on 2 D cells. The light spectrum was horrible, too. Good enough for the bathroom maybe, but not for a living room. Technology changed, fortunately. New LED light bulbs (bulbs?) are better than ever, cheaper than ever and the light spectrum is almost as good as the old, faithful light bulb (which I stockpiled).
LED Light Bulb, 44 pieces of 5050 LED's. The amount of light emitted by these bulbs is about equal to a conventional 40-50 Watt light bulb.
EMC
But what about EMC? No better way to find out than to buy a few on eBay. I paid less than $10 for two of these. That was a lucky find; normally they go for about $8/piece or so. I screwed both in, switched on my portable SW radio and held it close to the lamps, while checking all possible frequencies. Nothing. Nada. Zilch. No interference at all. This surprised me, to say the least. Other radio operators did report interference, and they bought respectable brands instead of cheap stuff made in China. I might buy a few more of these later in time. Or not, the expected life span exceeds 50.000 hours…
Product Details:
E27 LED Lamp
Base Type: E27
44 pieces SMD 5050 LEDs
Voltage: 85-265V
Power: 9W
Lumen: 700
Color temperature: 3000-3500K
Light color: Warm White
Lighting angle: 270 degrees
Lamp Size: approx. (LxD) 10.8 x 3.5cm / 4.25″ x 1.38″
Service life: 50.000 hours or more
14 days (or so) on KQ2H, 29.620 MHz
What can I say? So far, it has been great fun. There’s a bunch of regulars present there every morning (NYC local time), and a few regulars from Europe. The most prominent ham is probably M1OOO (M One Triple Oscar) who, at the time of writing, was able to work the repeater 46 days in a row.
The last three days I used the Albrecht AE497W (see one of the previous posts) to access this repeater. That worked fairly well, somewhat better than expected even. The incoming repeater signal, nor the Albrecht’s modest power output (21 Watts) were to blame for the contacts that failed. The main problems were:
- Some operators have no clue whatsoever that they’re calling CQ on a repeater input frequency,
- Some operators have microphones, but no ears (or no manners). They will flatten any signals getting ‘in their way’. These hams are referred to as “The Wolf Pack”.
- Some have no problem calling “CQ CQ” 20 times, while there’s still a QSO going on.
Then there’s a group of operators who don’t have bad intentions at all, but have their compression and mike gain at maximum, making their signal totally unreadable. FM deviation is as wide as the Atlantic Ocean, resulting in the worst distortion you can imagine. To make matters worse, they seem to be used to yelling so loud into the microphone that they would make a good salesman on a local market. Answering with “Switch off compression, back away from the microphone!” usually does the trick.
