Saturday, June 11, 2016

MW Revival


This is my latest radio acquisition. I've been testing it for a couple of weeks and it's extremely good.
As a Shortwave Listener (SWL) I've neglected listening to Medium Wave (MW). In my mind it was a bit of a mish-mash of UK and European stations, I also remember the band being a bit sparsely populated. While this may be true during daylight hours at night the MW band comes into its own. The above object is a Tecsun AN-200 and is a tunable medium wave loop antenna.
It works as if by magic too with no batteries required nor a connection to the radio. One simply positions it at right angles to the internal antenna and tune it to the same frequency that the radio is tuned to. The way it works is that at the same frequency as the radio it amplifies the signal being recieved and the radio uses the amplified signal to tune into. what this means is that even weak MW signals can be tuned into with enough clarity to listen to.
It won't change the signal to noise ratio and in some cases will amplify noise too but on the other hand it can bring out some stations that would be inaudible without it.
The units are reasonably cheap too, I think I paid about £17 for mine. They're certainly worth the investment if you like to listen to MW or are interested in a little MW DXing.

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