By way of introduction since I haven't posted to this group before, my name is Michael and I am located in the Kitsilano area of Vancouver, Canada. I have been DX'ing on-and-off for about 35 years, primarily in the SW Tropical bands, but have taken a fairly long hiatus from the hobby as for the past 10 years or so I have been living in an area close enough to downtown Vancouver that the RFI problem seemingly made it impossible to DX.
Recently however the bug hit me again, and I was tuning around with my only remaining Rx, a 7600G, and thought about MW one evening. I realized that by use of the nulling capability of a loop I could at least hear some modest DX, even though the RFI still makes it painful sometimes, especially remembering the 'good old days'. Nonetheless it seemed that MWDX might be possible here, and I was pumped by the logs of fellow DX'ers here on the West Coast and wanted to see what could be done. I live in a 4 story condo complex, thankfully on the top floor, but there are bylaws against satellite antennas, and so I figured that trying to explain antennas for MW or SWDX was a fairly useless endeavour. I had a Wellbrook 330S loop, and mounted it with a Channel Master rotor on a homebrew mast arrangement that sticks it up about 4 feet above the roofline and is attached to a satellite tripod and a 5cm plywood base which I now erect every evening at dusk and take down every morning. It's a tad inconvenient, but it works, and my fiancee is very forgiving of the 16foot monstrosity on the balcony. I picked up an ICF2010 on eBay in mint condition, also got a Quantum2.0+, and was ready to go. I also have a Heil DSP that is the bomb for getting rid of a lot of the noise. While my evening DX is still pretty modest due to the omnipresent noise (did I mention the power lines in the lane are at about the level of my balcony?) that is generated by the wifi and tv's in the immediate neighbourhood, inspired by the logs of Nick Hall-Patch and others I got up early this morning and logged my first ever TP's, with the Wellbrook at 270degrees: 774 JOUB - 1325UTC, JJ man speaking, easily understandable to a native speaker 828 JOIB - as above I have found that the Wellbrook provides higher gain than the Quantum, and have to keep the 'Local/DX' switch on the 2010 to 'Local' - this reduces the RFI as well, albeit at the cost of some signal strength but not intelligibility in many cases. When I use the Quantum I swap it back to 'DX' on the 2010. There were a number of other hets available when I tuned around in SSB looking for them, but frankly the excitement of the moment overtook me a bit and I kept going back to these two to make sure that It was happening.... Thanks everyone on the list for the inspiration! Michael _______________________________________________ IRCA mailing list [email protected] http://montreal.kotalampi.com/mailman/listinfo/irca Opinions expressed in messages on this mailing list are those of the original contributors and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of the IRCA, its editors, publishing staff, or officers For more information: http://www.ircaonline.org To Post a message: [email protected]
