24 december 2011

its nearly time for santa to come and i hope you all get the radio toys that you want and i hope santa gets me a new house in the north of scotland with no neighbours for 50 miles and room for beverages in all directions and a swedish bimbo to make my coffee in the morning but i dont think the wife will be too pleased at that one LOL !. have a great day when it comes ... Merry Christmas All ...

21 december 2011

as you will gather with my lack of posts the MW band is still extremely poor for dx and although the regular east coast stations are coming in and i have seen reports on the skype chat that CBC is coming in as early as 1730 i just cant get the enthusiasm for these common stations and to be honest in the run up to Santa coming and at this time of the year when cousins etc who i haven't seen for years turn up at the door i haven't been doing much dxing. there is still not much of a dawn peak that i can see and the band is dropping off from 0830 - 0900 and once again there is reports of regular east coast stations coming in at 1100 but  my interest is not there to listen to WWKB at that time and what a difference to the logs of Martin Hall who has been logging west coast USA ... Alaska etc at midday ... i wonder if Santa will get me a house in the north of Scotland.

14 december 2011

DAMN SMALL LINUX ....

as the MW band has been so poor it has given me time to play around with other things and a few months ago i started to get Linux running on an old original xbox which i finished yesterday and while the original xbox by today's standards is very old you can still have allot of fun with them and i hacked mine so it can play backup games from the hard drive which i swapped the original 8 gig one for a 120 gig hard drive which lets me put on allot of games and with XBMC ( xbox media centre ) i have put on my avi files ( movies ... tv series etc ) and allot of mp3 music etc and i can also stream movies or music from my pc in the shack to the xbox in the living room.

going back to linux and i installed a version called " damn small Linux " which can be found on any xbox update/program disk and  the original xbox has an Intel celeron processor running at 733 MHz with 64 meg of ram and graphics is Similar to the GeForce 3 Ti500 and with the new 120 gig hard drive by today's standards you wouldn't bother with it and on the front of the xbox there are four controller ports which are basically usb ports and with a simple mod to a mouse and keyboard or you could buy/make an adaptor it gives you the full functions of a pc and if i am not in the mood to climb up into the shack and use my pc and if the xyl/daughter are using their own pc/laptop i can switch on the xbox and run Linux to browse the web .... check emails .... or even go onto skype and as i said by today's standards the system is ancient but its an interesting project to turn a xbox into a VERY handy media centre ( which plays all formats ) and web browser and make it do things what its not supposed to do

                                           linux desktop

                                 xbox media centre ( xbmc )

                                        original xbox

13 december 2011

as you will gather by my lack of posts the MW band is still VERY poor and its got to the stage i am having a quick check before i go to bed and not even recording over night and dxing " live " when i get up in the morning usually around 0600 and this morning was no exception and from 0600 i didnt record as there was nothing interesting coming in. i can see myself giving Ken his perseus back as its better to record 100 KHz of crap with the PMSDR than recording 2 meg of crap with the perseus LOL !

8 december 2011

once again the extremely poor conditions continue on MW and my enthusiasm is just not there at the moment when the dx is WWKB etc. i have been recording overnight but listening to the files don't take long as there is simply nothing there worth listening too and still conditions seem to drop off at the so called dawn peak. low vhf is not much better and don't get me wrong there is still some good signals about above 30 MHz from New York etc which is actually good dx but as you receive the same stations day after day it gets a bit boring.

the weather has taken a turn for the worse and we have had a mixed bunch ranging from hail sleet heavy snow and as i type there is VERY strong gusts of wind and very heavy rain. so that's about it and sorry to the people who read my blog as due to the bad conditions there is nothing much to write about.

5 december 2011

another poor weekend for dx on MW and low vhf and this morning on MW from 0600 - 0800 it was just pathetic and at 0800 there was just weak common stations coming in. i noticed this morning the SFI is on a steady increase and hopefully this brings back good conditions on low vhf.

1 december 2011

once again the MW band very poor and nothing to report. myself and Ken were back at his new beverage which he replaced the faulty section of coax with 2 core electrical cable which the idea came from Bjarne Mjelde  and we fed audio from his shack through the coax/electrical cable to the feed point of the beverage just to make sure there was no faults and the audio was loud and clear through a speaker which we then connected the main beverage wire to the balun and the power cord was connected to the coax side of the balun. we then returned to his shack and made some tests against his beverage in the wood and everything seems fine ie the Faeroe's on 531 was more or less the same signal and same for the Irish stations BUT ! on  1008 the dutch station was well down on the new beverage and the likes of 1044 on the wood beverage he was getting Germany and on the new beverage Spain was coming in and so far it looks promising but we wont know until the transatlantic stations come in .... more to follow ....