How to Get Started In Short Wave Listening, Radios and SDRs - Livestream

what is up everybody welcome to the ham radio crash course welcome to saturday hope you had a great week we're going to be talking about short wave radio listening today s-w-l-i-n-g [Music] enjoy the memes as we kick things off here and again thanks for taking the time to hop on out how's it going everybody i am josh ki6naz welcome to the ham radio crash course somebody says i've got an echo how is that is the echo better is it gone gone hopefully the echo's gone gone i'll wait i'll open a beer while i'm getting ready we're drinking the ale smith which is a black velvet oatmeal stout hopefully the echo is gone let's pour it out here into the ham radio crash course official pine class official pine glass again happy saturday everybody happy saturday to you and for ejc hope you had a good week okay well nobody's complaining so i guess the echo's gone all right i hope things are good let's see first stream ever from grn poblano right on right on yeah covet hair no more everybody congratulations covet hair is gone uh appreciate the the comments on that thank you very much uh boy we got a lot to talk about but at the same time we're going to have just a lot of fun i'm going to do a bit of an intro explaining with some slides on what shortwave listening is and then we're going to use some radios in an example of kind of how to use them what they're for you know it's we're taking something that's relatively simple and we're going to add a level of complexity to it because at the end of the day you just go by radio go outside and listen to it and have a great time shortwave listening is really that in a nutshell so stick around though hopefully i'm going to give you some good information so right off the top i i do want to say a big thank you to the a-r-l i was awarded the bill leonard award for professional journalists or journalist video production is the award that i got and it really means a lot to me and i really appreciate it so thank you the awrl for for doing that and i'm i'm very honored i'm incredibly honored so thank you very much i appreciate that uh yeah very good uh let's see what else uh leia another great leia's just killing me with with um with all the stuff she's doing now she's updated the website so hammery crashcourse.com has a new face to it and it is wonderful she's done a great job in integrating all kinds of different stuff and and i want to point people to it specifically because uh it talks about you know who we are we've got some of the admin team here there's ethan and evan and matt and chris will probably get on there in a little bit and also for those that are curious it links to our videos to the podcast the facebook group to the discord it links to the facebook page and the group and then for those that are interested in ham nation you've got um all the information on when it's scheduled the videos the podcast and we got the podcast working so the rss feed is working too i am so ecstatic things are doing great so thank you leia a wonderful job as always and it also takes you to the shop by the way ham tactical oh that's too early for that where's ham tactical there it is so ham tactical we've got um leia is referencing the qrp shirt so if you haven't gotten into the qrp shirts yet we've got team qrp qrp is for heroes and i have low power which is my favorite uh one of these i particularly like that with the 705 there on the side so appreciate it craig thank you for the super chat thumbs up there appreciate that craig love that thank you very much all right so what are we talking about let me go right into it because like i said we got a lot to cover and not a lot to do by the way there will be a discord after chat and we are doing a giveaway on discord and oh another super chat from kd9 pbq yippee it's hrcc time send some of that global warming to the midwest high of wow five fahrenheit tomorrow in north illinois congrats on the award thank you very much so we are doing a discord after chat and i do have a link pinned in the chat room right now you can click it it will take you to the discord server which is kind of our primary location for all the communication we do on ham radio and we're doing a giveaway over there what's the giveaway today is a eaton mini elite mini soft shortwave receiver it also does medium wave which is basically am and uh and it does fm not long wave oh no it's okay good am fm and is that working it is working there we go and it's an animated gif so what you do is you just click the link to the server go to the giveaway hashtag giveaway click on that and then on the little um right here that little 448 where the little names popped up just click on that horn so it's red if you see the number went up you're in you don't even have to stay watching and you'll be in the contest if you win i'll message you and i'll send it wherever you need me to send it so i appreciate that ben glenden glendoning all right thank you for the super chat what did he say first live stream taking my technician test tomorrow appreciate all you do and thanks for helping me get into ham radio you're welcome ben oh not glenn ben thank you very much i appreciate that all right let's let's throw it over to the slides introduction to shortwave radio and really shortwave radio i'll talk a little bit about it in a couple of slides but it's kind of a worldwide radio information exchange right it's a everything we're talking about is including broadcast stations that broadcast on different shortwave frequencies and because we know with hf frequencies by the way hf radio exists in the shortwave portion of the radio spectrum those waves bounce refract off the ionosphere and that's what gives you beyond line of sight capability with your radios so that's how that works let me flip it over here boop so what is shortwave radio simply put it's all the frequency space right from the top of the medium wave band uh same area as broadcast am which is about 1.7 megahertz to the bottom i left that radio on the bottom of the very high frequency space which is about 30 megahertz super chat from oof radio michael alfredo thank you very much kd9 oof thanks for all the help you've given me this week rfi sucks yeah we have been hunting rfi like crazy here in the shack as well and i've knocked it down again i should talk about that at the end we probably will or we'll definitely talk about it in the after chat so join us over there shortwave radio encompasses the entire frequency space including many high frequency amateur radio bands as i've already mentioned and shortwave frequencies reflect off the ionosphere to achieve beyond line of sight eg world communications grn poblano uh poblano thank you very much for the super chat hero in three weeks past oh zero to hero in three weeks past element two and three today all because of your channel thank you very much i appreciate that and russell harper thank you for the super chat just passed my technician on thursday thanks for the assist congrats on the award thank you and thank the awrl i appreciate that love the podcast live stream and after chat thanks again thank you i appreciate you guys all making it out there wish you make a video about radio for motorcycles if i had a motorcycle i might but i i think that that's something i could probably put together so what is a shortwave radio receiver right these are receive only radios that pick up all the shortwave frequencies often more though they'll do long wave in some cases and medium wave which is all the lower side of the frequency space not a lot of the high side stuff although some do that shortwave in the past was one major way that people stayed connected to news and world information there are still shortwave channels that exist that beam their signals into specific countries because they want to get that information there you can imagine during the cold war right imagine the propaganda the information that was being sent back and forth over shortwave in fact you could do a deep dive and a historian level deep dive on the interesting stories of shortwave and the axis allies powers and and cold war all through that time the interesting stuff they were doing broadcasting information in to places kind of behind enemy lines that includes all the clandestine radios which we did a video on back in halloween of 2020 where we talked about clandestine radios and what they were used for number stations will come up here a little bit in this chat but you kind of get the idea they're they're hugely important to a lot of people who don't get relatively good access to the internet or relatively good access to television broadcast because they live in countries where they're restricted or there's just not good examples of you know television programming that's available to them now the internet has changed that a lot but at the same time they still exist and i'll and i'll talk to you a little bit about it in fact i've got a website couple of websites that do a fantastic job of that so make sure i didn't miss anything brian kirby thank you for the super chat thanks for all the great info general license all thanks to your motivation to get back to studying thank you and there's another one hey eric b thank you thank you everybody for the super chats i appreciate it just passed my tech in general last week with your help got approval from the boss to step up to a mobile appreciate all the info on your channel thank you very much now for that reason shortwave radio is kind of like an everyman's radio hobby information gathering tool and there's various levels that you can go through if you're looking to purchase a shortwave radio they start out very inexpensively i've actually that one that i'm that i'm giving away that eaton is under 20 dollars and it's okay for shortwave we'll talk about that um but there's a ton on the market that are relatively inexpensive like that teksun pl 380 that's there on the lower the lower radio on that picture i think i can point to it haha i can that's not a bad radio for shortwave although we'll talk about it in a second it's lacking some features that you may want now shortwave also is a hobbyist and enthusiast hobby and oh boy it can get very expensive particularly if you're looking at the higher end of shortwave radios quite considerably expensive and again we'll talk about that as we go forward so what's one of the dividers for the more expensive radios versus the inexpensive it's i'm gonna mute this speaking of speaking of shortwave radios this is an icom ic530 and yowza it's also kind of expensive but it does a lot so single sideband is kind of like the the dividing line for a lot of shortwave radios there are plenty of radios that are cheaper than than the single sideband ones but that's generally in the less than 100 range when you start going above that point that's where you pick up access to things like single sideband and that's what gives you the ability to listen to a lot of amateur radio communications which is generally what we use when we're transmitting on voice for amateur radio case in point there is the skywave c crane skyway which i've talked about many times on videos it does single sideband and it's also about 175 by the way there's a link in the description to amazon it is my affiliate store i'm an amazon affiliate but i have a page just for shortwave listening with the radios i recommend a radio that's less expensive than the single sideband uh the skywave and is actually kind of a better performer on shortwave is the texan pl 660 a fantastic radio if you want a physical radio i would demonstrate it today but i actually gave it to my my stepdad because he's getting interested in radio receiving so i just gave it to him like here you go enjoy the radio but it's a fantastic radio pick one of those up so what do you listen to what do you what do you do with shortwave you've got this receiver that has this wide banded receive capability go up and down this massive frequency space what do you listen to the answer is whatever you possibly can there's many different things out there for me though it's kind of like hide and seek it i look at listening to shortwave as kind of like an unexplored trail a road you've never gone down you're using your radio to kind of listen to different spaces of what's making it to you either long distance stations or you know local stations it's always interesting to find new things and really you know kind of before the internet and i'll mention this here because this is kind of like my introduction to radio is shortwave i got an am radio that had a sw it had a couple of sws one two three bands and the first time i flicked that on i didn't hear anything it wasn't later that i learned oh if i go outside and i and i set the radial up and i kind of like get away from it make sure it's not around anything i was able to hear some like far off stations and i'm hearing music that like where'd this come from this is not the top 40. and it became really interesting when i started learning more about it and you know this is again before the internet that it really started to intrigue me there was news programs from other countries that i would hear australia being one of the big ones uh the shortwave station that i kind of grew up listening and so yeah it was like my gateway drug into radio if you will so what do you can whatever you can that's what i listen to and i've included some links here john w3 jfs thank you for the super chat hi josh thanks for the great content i love swelling and i'm sure i'll love it even more with the sdr play rspdx comes in the mail next week right on thank you very much for the super chat so a couple of links and i will post these in the description and if you're a patron you uh will get the slides after this this streaming i post my slides over on patreon by the way guys big thank you again to the patrons this episode is a patreon picks episode the first weekend of the new month the day that i stream is always a patron picks episode i let them decide what the topic of discussion will be and so today shortwave listening they voted and that's what they picked so we're going to look at these websites in a second when we get just before we start playing with the radios and uh these are really cool uh particularly shortwave.am go check that out if you've got on a computer and you've got another tab you can pull open go check that out it's pretty interesting what more can shortwave receivers do so as i mentioned they at least include medium wave broadcast am some have long wave although that's kind of a difficult for some people to get on the receive side myself included because i'm on a small lot most have broadcast fm however there are more feature-rich radios that will include noaa weather alerts or just listening to the newer weather frequencies some will include airbands so you can listen to the planes and the ground stations that are you know correct directing traffic some have gps like that uh rs230 the icon there that i have a picture of and in fact those are the modes on the high side this radio knows the difference between vhf uhf and also down on the um on the hf side and it works it works really really well um for switching different bands and different modes of operation let me make sure i didn't screw something up here okay good uh yeah and you can see that in the image there it'll do fm fm narrow am am narrow but then it'll do dstar it'll decode p25 it will do pmr and it'll do nxdn those are all digital voice modes that we use on the high side frequencies now if you start going down this road you'll start hearing a term general coverage receiver so a general coverage receiver is more towards the ham radio side of the house they're usually bigger desktop units or receivers that icom is the exception though that's a handheld general coverage receiver and those generally go a little bit further they'll go down to like one kilohertz and then all the way up to 30 megahertz as a general statement obviously we know that the 7300 goes higher than that because it covers six meters which is technically a part of the vhf frequency space not the hf space but it's still included in a lot of hf radios so you may be thinking can't i just use my ham radio yes most ham radios now most base station ham radios they'll as you start cranking the bands when you go down below or above a ham band they'll turn the tx off but they still receive and in fact my 7300 is what i do most shortwave listening with nowadays unless i'm on travel or i'm going out somewhere portable you know the icon 705 same functionality that's a fantastic radio for in the field as well however you don't need to buy a icon 705 to get started with shortwave listening and it's actually much cheaper to just buy a shortwave radio than going that route all right now software to find radio software-defined radio and the introduction of cheap inexpensive dongles and devices like the sdr play rsp1a here have really opened up the accessibility of shortwave you can buy one of these for 100 or less the dongles are even cheaper and you get way more functionality than even one of the little handheld or portable shortwave devices at least that's my opinion the sdrs connect you to your computer basically and the software on the computer is doing much of the heavy lifting that the discrete components of a handheld radio would normally do so with an sdr your only limit is basically the hardware on your computer and the software you run so you can do decoding of p25 if you're into scanning with a software defined radio and appropriate software or you can listen all the way down into the hf bands the real super advantage of the sdrs which i will demonstrate live tonight is that they will do some kind of spectrum waterfall display which makes hunting around on the bands even easier because if you're using a handheld one of the little portable units or even just an older desktop general coverage receiver they generally don't have a waterfall right so 7300 is the exception in some of the newer radios so you're literally looking at a frequency readout and just spinning the vfo with an sdr you see a big wide swath of data and that information you can click on it and it'll take you immediately to that frequency it speeds up the process incredibly it is a wonderful wonderful tool that you should have in your arsenal and it makes shortwave listening a lot of fun okay so more fun things to listen to so we talked about broadcast stations broadcast shortwave i i mentioned and i'll show you the scheduling for different shortwave stations but keep in mind you know going back to what we've talked about in other videos preom.org is where you can do number station lookup for when number stations will be active there's the shortwave radiogram which is actually a shortwave radio station that transmits digital data or audio over the air that you can decode with your computer and it connected to the radio or you feed the audio into the computer and it's actually a combination of a text show with images and radio along with it so it's a it's a quite an interesting concept so s w radiogram dot net will give you the information they broadcast on fridays saturdays and sundays and all the time is in utc so make sure you follow that while you're while you're thinking about doing it i should mention also everything we're going to be talking about today is in utc time hopefully it'll make sense as you see it when i flip everything over here but it's important to keep that in mind if you're not setting yourself to utc time when you're you might want to and let's see military radio military radio is a lot of fun and again here's the links i'll post some of them in the description and you can you can check them out that way but yeah there's a ton of military hf radio frequencies that you can listen to when you are short wave listening joe if you're still not ready to you know take the plunge into shortwave listening no big deal there's a couple of really great free websites free services people are actually lending people access to their equipment to listen to shortwave frequencies a couple of the main ones in my mind are kiwisdr.com and it will show you a map and you can pick on a receiver wherever you want it could be on the other side of planet and you can be listening to radio over on the other side of the planet there's also websdr.org which does a similar function both are completely free websites again people are donating basically to the internet access to their software-defined radios and so you don't have to pay for a thing if you want to try out sdr listening or shortwave listening you can just use the website and get access to it that way it's a great way to get started it's a great way to expose people to radio introduce them to what it's all about and what you can hear on the air super a lot of fun so let's say you go and buy a radio portable radio whatever what's the first thing you should do go outside with it i appreciate it's a little cold right now but it will make sense in a second the shortwave radios particularly the portable ones come with you know a built-in aerial and they don't do that well indoors particularly if you are indoors and you have a house that has like plaster on lath or you've got radiant barriers on your roof anything metallic is basically going to attenuate the signals coming in and and those weak signals those are the ones you're trying to pull in those are those you know other stations on the other side of planet that you want to pick up as like a dx receive station for shortwave so go outside go outside set up the radial get in front of the radio and have some fun and generally that's what you need to consider is that often if you're having a hard time with shortwave listening you need to get outside with the radio or you need to have another solution and that's where listening from inside your home well how do you do that i will show you what i'm using uh in a second here we got plenty of time good because we got a lot to cover still but basically i use a vertical antenna and that has a preamp inside my home i'm using a long wire antenna and i also use my step ir why not right i have the ability to adjust for frequency that i want to receive and i do that i appreciate that's way overkill but you can use a dipole you can use a long wire antenna a n-fed half-wave is a good one a zepp antenna is also a good one but the basic thing that you have to keep in mind is to to effectively listen to a faraway station you generally want your antenna to be one quarter wavelength of the frequency that you desire to listen to so there are conversion charts you can look up online if you're determined to try and get down to the 3.6 megahertz or 3.4 megahertz or 3.3 megahertz band for shortwave broadcasts then you may need to calculate what length of long wire you need to make that happen john shearell thank you so much for the super chat he says great presentation i appreciate it so keep in mind here's the example a 20 meter dipole antenna will work but it will only be effective for listening to frequencies down 220 meters 14 megahertz and up it may get past that but it's not necessarily going to be as effective so you want to size your antenna appropriately for what you're trying to receive you know i'll make a second point if you really get into this and you're really interested in in listening to shortwave stations on the different shortwave bands you might want to consider making yourself like a fan dipole and that fan dipole will have multiple elements specifically for those frequencies that you're trying to pick up you can use the same fan dipole that you have for ham radio will likely be okay for shortwave listening because again those bands are not the same frequency bands for the broadcast shortwave listening locations with you know within the frequency space so keep that in mind all right so good info on shortwave listening thomas who he and i have exchanged a couple emails talking about stuff in the past over at s-w-l-i-n-g.com he does pretty much the best job in covering shortwave radios and kind of like interesting topics that's going on in and around shortwave listening as a hobby he has a great blog which is s-w-l-i-n-g-d forward slash blog and it's it's my go-to for radio review information information on all kinds of stuff so uh big cheers to thomas i really appreciate what he does and keep it up good buddy so i'm going to leave the questions on for a second because we're going to flip it over here i've got a lot of stuff to show and i kind of want to walk through what i'm using for an antenna setup and how i do shortwave listening k8mrd with the 762 my favorite uh my favorite number appreciate the super chat thank you um chat there says what about long wire i already mentioned it uh but i do i do recommend longwear all right so we've got some some radios on the bench here and these are all shortwave radios these are receivers some of them are obviously ham radio like that 705 there but what i need to show you and i want to do this in the best way possible i normally there's not so many wires but it's tough to do a demonstration when when i've got that stuff going on so right above my head is a little box here that um that i've been using for a while let me slide over so this is a i want to do this in a way that i don't disconnect it this is an mfj sdr receiver multi-coupler and it allows me to have multiple receivers connected you know i should just hide the chat for a second it allows me to have one or two antennas on the input and multiple output bncs because remember we're not transmitting with shortwave receivers we're just listening and that makes things pretty handy for for doing shortwave listening and that's actually how i have it wired up right now because i have both my sdr play and then i have a random lead that i will connect to for doing uh doing different things with the the radios we're going to be looking at today oh and the strat and the chat's gone tactical malort in the background there i can't touch that stuff a question in the chat about loops yeah absolutely um there are a great many receiver loops that you can use there are ones that are adjustable loops and uh yeah there's super super cool options in loop in fact receive loop antennas do a really good job on the receive side of the house it's the it's the transmit side that makes them so high q and narrow uh somebody mentioned swelling and the crazy where is it oh i missed it i wanted to say oh is that it is no that's not what happened to that chat i built a fan dipole oh there you go jp in tucson says i built a fan dipole specifically cut for shortwave listening frequencies back in the early 90s and installed it on the long attic of an apartment building i lived in it worked well yeah that's awesome that's a that's a great way to go anyway swelling recently talked about a radio receiver that is a it's a software-defined radio but it's a portable unit and he pointed us all to it i believe it's like is it russian i know it's it's euros they they sell them on a blog i bought one um it didn't come in time i really wanted to show you all but i definitely bought one so yeah i get affected by uh radio procurement syndrome as much as you do gc asks what about a discount discounts work well discounts are usually better for uh scanning so the higher frequency stuff we're talking about shortwave which is the lower end you generally do pretty well with a long wire okay let's uh let's do this i'm gonna i'm gonna flip it over we're gonna take a look at yeah let's do that i'm going to show you how i connect these two to this little device and then we'll do a little bit of fun with the sdr okay so you've seen this radio many times this is my c crane skywave now i i'm just going to demonstrate this because it's obviously um going to be bad but i'm going to go ahead and turn it on with the with the radial or sorry the aerial extended and let's go to okay so we can't hear wwv at all by the way commit this frequency to memory this is the time system out of colorado that we use and and there's just nothing there so what i've done and let me back this up a little bit so you can see it so here's my receiver box that splits out the antennas and i've got a lead going to coax that comes out i'm knocking over radios and then i've got two plugs so if i connect that and let me make sure we're on the right we're moving antennas right now okay oh see what happens i dropped it and we are picking up wwv so so that's the first thing i wanted to show is basically how i'm doing the antenna okay next let's turn this off something that um i do with most radios as far as shortwave listening is i'll connect up the antenna and i'll do a scan in fact i'm going to go back to this guy and i'm going to switch the antennas though there's there's a reason for that so we're going to go back a short wave come on there we go really good signal there so i'm going to turn off the step ir and i'm going to go to my long wire antenna a bit noisier and we're going to do a scan [Applause] so generally what i do is i'll get my wherever i'm going again i kind of play hide and seek with the radio i'm not uh i'm not necessarily pulling up a guide you know for whatever's live at the time although i will show you that on the web here in a little bit i generally just pull out the radio get the antenna set up and i just start listening i just want to pull all the things out and you can see it's it's pulling in we're on page one and it's found three channels so far and that's down in the 30 the 80 meter portion of the ham radio space and you'll see it it'll start going up as we go it'll start pulling out more channels or channels is the wrong word frequencies so it stopped at 5k 5k is wwv so we've already got that i also have a a bit of a knit i'm gonna talk about a radio i don't recommend you buy and it's on this table so we're pulling out more and this is a this is kind of a i won't call it cheating because you know it's in the radio for a reason but i definitely scan a lot to to pull out the the frequencies in fact i'll come back over here so you can see me until it's done i do a lot of scanning for this reason i like to turn the scan on and just do its thing by the way a lot of ham radios don't do necessarily a great job at scanning some are better than others and the advantage though with the shortwave radios is that they generally have a scan function that ports it into a page that's like temporary memory so wherever you go you go to a new area and it just boom hit that scan walk away go and pack your luggage or whatever do whatever yours you do and come back over and then you can kind of scroll through and see what's going on we do know obviously that when you are doing shortwave listening just like ham radio there's a day-night cycle shortwave listening is usually a little bit better at night so keep that in mind too yeah lots of good comments coming in thanks everybody for watching i really appreciate it uh reminder you've got 15 minutes to get into the contest the link is on the chat the contest is over on discord and there are how many people we got in here now there are 520 people that are in the the giveaway right now so that's awesome and i'll send you a free radio that's the wrong that's the wrong one there it is but yeah go go buy some go buy some t-shirts amp tactical.com appreciate it uh wow it's still going we're on two pages and eight channels and it literally it's gonna scroll through the whole bands now some some radios are better scanners than others and i will show an example of the the radio i'm giving away i've got an extra one a sealed one that i'll send to the winner but i kept one for myself and there's a reason for it uh yeah 774 people thank you so much for watching i appreciate it i'm having a little fun with uh shortwave listening now i do have to be really careful here because um i am not trying to get a copyright strike there is often music that's on shortwave you know it's broadcast so if it's a music station i'm just going to quickly go to the next station so i don't get a strike um but yeah you you understand why wow three pa we're actually picking up a lot that long wire is a recent setup i changed its orientation and i like it i like it a lot it's not great for transmitting just because the orientation i don't get out very far but it does really well on the receive side steven was that stephen yeah stephen walters with the uh gear acquisition it's indeed a problem scout 75 enjoy a second beer on me thank you very much just went back to keto so no beer on my menu have to have coors light instead and that's and that's not even beer we don't really count that as beer no i'm just kidding i don't care what you enjoy i just don't drink that stuff what wire antenna do you recommend for a radio of like the sky wave what wire antenna do you recommend so uh great question and i apologize i i'm gonna actually pull it up well while we're talking while we're waiting we're still waiting on the scan to finish the c-crane comes with the c-crane comes with a wire winder antenna and i really like it it's a long oh we just finished we can go over that in a second let me show you they sell this it actually comes with the skywave it's 15 bucks it's the best one of these in the market and i've tried quite a few of them and they're mostly pretty bad this one is like the best one but it's still not great um this does a good job though for 15 you basically have to have a long wire to be successful but again you got to get it outside if you're not going to get it outside then you need to have something like an n-fed half-wave or a fan dipole or a vertical kind of i'll show you why that may not be a great idea but that may be your only option and so we just have to go with that so okay we've got memories loaded into the radio right now and we're going to take a listen to some of them there's a question you just select giveaway and stay there no you gotta click the red party horn click the little red party horn under the giveaway it's like an emoji all right so basically you control this my freaking ears wait yeah that's this is not helping okay so we're back to let me go back here all right so two four one zero ah i gotta figure out a better solution for this looks like spanish radio [Applause] [Applause] and there is wwv again that's the uh the five megahertz yeah so give away everybody in the giveaway chat uh it's it looks like a pizza slice but it's a party horn [Music] that's some kind of classical music encouragement some stations are not as good as others [Music] this station always comes in really loud it's a christian religious station a lot of that in the united states i'm not going to spend much time on this i just wanted to show you what the process was yeah okay you get the idea now the long wire antenna do i have this is this powered up correctly oh what's going on okay let me let me flip this over here in fact let me show you i'm juggling a couple of power leads to make this all work so all right so we had those frequencies that we were picking up so i'm going to use the vertical that's outside i've got it connected here on this lead it's going to get connected to this guy here let's see if we can pick up any of the [Applause] same so that's wwv is in there but not great yeah so again if i switch it back let me go back to wv you got some splatter so let's switch and i gotta move the power back [Applause] not quite set up for an a b comparison [Applause] [Music] not great we had it better i don't know what was the deal with that [Applause] jeffrey centex great question why does the secret not have an antenna port i i think it should uh i think by and large because this is a traveling radio a portable radio you're not really not really going to do that all right before we switch over to the sdr and show you how to go track down some fun stations i am going to show you one radio i do not recommend you buy i bought it on a whim and i should not have done that as much as i like this little guy for listening to like fm and am by the way this is the one i'm giving away it's the one behind it actually in the box but i bought the eaton traveler on a whim and this is not a good radio i mean it's fine but it's it's not really effective it doesn't do shortwave and it um it really is for its world clock which is something that is kind of a novelty these days it's not that it's not that interesting or compelling to have a world clock these days if you if you look at it it's it's kind of antiquated with its design and it doesn't perform very well i'm not trying to throw a bunch of shade at eaton but i just bought it and i'm not that happy with it uh g mitchell thank you for the super chat just starting back in a ham radio after 45 years of studying for my technician's license after after 45 years off studying for my technician license right on congratulations on getting back in it works great as a clock like a world clock because i can change this to los angeles and you know that's that's accurate wait is that accurate yes that is accurate right yeah okay but aside from that i don't know why you wouldn't just get one of these actually i know why this is 175 dollars and this is 55 but if you wanted something that's better and about the same price it's the text on um 380 does a much better job way better job it does have a pleather case that's kind of nice but whatever a couple of other ones i would recommend over both of those is the gp 5 single side band this is a copy of a 10 tech which so if you go with the 10 tech that's fine too this one does single sideband and is under 100 i believe it's 80 this is sold by um it's ameritak radio but it's sold by county com online county com it's okay i did a review on this go watch this video if you want to know my thoughts it doesn't have a dial it doesn't have a keypad so you got to do the dial to to move and even though it's zombie green it's it's not very handy okay last thing i'll mention is this guy just turn on bud so i i i use it because i like classical music and it picks up my station i like a lot so that's the reason i use it but let me go down to shortwave here i'm trying to come on okay see that's the problem with this is i have to go through all this to get down to uh 5k let's see if we can do see if we can get the uh wwv it is in there that's funny there it is i don't know if you can hear that it's barely in there i'm holding it so that's messing with it but it does work uh what else i have reviewed the icon r30 it is a fantastic radio but very expensive and does way more than shortwave listening but okay i i've literally done reviews on almost all these radios so if you're more interested i will post the links in the description so you can follow along with that but what i want to do right now is i want to show you sdrs so let's let's flip her over here okay to do that since you're in front of a computer one of the things i recommend and we're one minute from the giveaway maybe the the giveaway thing got kind of buggered there's a couple of websites hfradio.org this will give you a listing at any one time of radios that are transmitting a fantastic website although i really like this guy this guy is it this guy it's this guy this website's cool shortwave am so check this out and we gotta check on the giveaway here in a couple of minutes so this will give you based off of your geographic location what it thinks stations you can hear and so we're going to test this out we're going to test this out with my sdr and we're about to do the giveaway so let me pull this up i don't know if it's going to work oh it will work five minutes okay good so basically what i do is go in here refresh and and let it get access to your location otherwise isn't going to work and then you do estimated signal and you hit now and it'll populate all the frequencies that it thinks you can hear like we got some big frequencies coming in and it'll color code them based off of whether you know you can actually listen to them or not we're going to test it and i'm going to show you how we do that in a second um let me are we still at five minutes i didn't pick oh i guess i got five minutes okay so let me let me flip over the antenna and i'll get it down to 40 meters while we wait let me reposition some things hey thank you from southern shaves man thank you josh i just passed my tech and general test today thanks for your videos and ham study well congratulations that's awesome very good so we're looking at let's go yeah where'd the chat go there it is so this is it's just a whole jumble of stuff uh this is my sdr play that i have connected and we do have 40 and we're still on that antenna so we should be good so let's see if we can hear this why can we not hear it why dog it was working before sdr play sometimes or sdr uno works great when you're not live streaming but it seems to get all buggered uh when uh when you go live i don't know why so let's try this again ta-da it's broke it was literally working it was literally working before the stream you know what you can always count on is something not working and today is no exception it is not working it is working but not working is it squelch no it's just not outputting is it that's working [Laughter] is it from when you turn down the echo no because the sound the the theme song still plays it's strictly this stuff this app sometimes is kind of buggered it's not bad got it okay why it did that i don't know all right let me get off of the religious stuff for a second let me drop the volume down uh did we find a giveaway winner yet minute 45 seconds enter the giveaway all right so let's let's grab one of the frequencies that we can probably hear let's see i want something that is going to be uh world of radio 7780 let's go with that one there's something in there so yes 57 seconds for the contest we got 628 people in right now let me go ahead and pull that up we'll get a winner live and i'll open my second beer who's gonna win [Music] yeah i feel 10 meter up the coast does pretty well this is in reply to the facebook user sorry facebook doesn't cross over on the chat room correctly right now within the server for the live chat don't know why that is oh i just noticed it's black velvet that's the name of this black velvet all right three seconds chappy ag congratulations you won the eaton elite mini compact am fm shortwave receiver and i would put it in that order of how good it is am is pretty good fm is fine and short ways not that great all right let's go back over here and we'll find another what's what else we got north america eastern north america a lot of adventist world radio so let's try and pull that one up 9395 not there not hearing them but there is a signal that's right next door so let's let's zoom in and it's in the noise but this is one of those fun things is we went there looking for a particular signal couldn't hear it so now we're just going to poke around a little bit james k thank you for the super chat chappie said draw again okay uh do we have an admin in the house do we have an admin in the house that can rerun the numbers loyal we'll handle that in the after chat by the way everybody that's signed up you're in you're in don't worry about it uh so if you follow the after chat if you're following us over there we'll rerun it if chappie is kidding i don't know i'll message him after the show and we'll figure it out i'll message chappie after don't freak out chappie i'm not gonna give it away if you want it so let's open this up a bit so this is uh medium wave this is all am stuff so i'm not going to stay here very long but you can see this massive station is 640. it's always super paid off the 33 000 worth of credit really loud that's not shortwave though all right here we go [Music] 7305 [Music] okay so 7435 is a really loud signal let's see where that's at seven three four three five seven four three five is could be could be wrong let me let me refresh this and see who's on that frequency right now seven four three five this is not even buddy anymore listed [Laughter] okay let's flip it over to this guy and see if he's got seven four three five no where is seven so that's interesting um sometimes you hear things that you know don't even exist that maybe down in mexico or south america this is this is why these are so good the sdrs is that you can literally just poke around wherever you want and listen to whatever you find interesting there we go okay so six zero three zero we gotta find one i don't wanna wrap until i find one six zero three zero not there oh so this must all be local stuff no not that one no i don't want that one what a bummer we're gonna find one of these i promise that is a great big signal but it's like [Music] okay 59.35 we're going to figure this one out we're going to get one 5935 5935 dr gene scott so here's here's the here's the play of this one yeah it's it's christian but most of the uh stations that you're in the united states are going to have a christian aspect to them i don't want to listen too long and get myself in trouble uh let's see actually let's let's hop off of here there we go let's let's use that website again actually and find something interesting so back to the web here what is it saying uh it i asked it to show me all the estimated signals maybe we killed it let's do not any station strongest signals let's do that now did i kill this website what happened is everybody using this website right now is there that many people use this website right now we crashed it did we just crash the website live we've got 750 people it was like peak 800 did we just kill the west side [Laughter] oh man that's funny oh that's funny uh yeah don't blame me guys don't blame me and it's gone press f to pay respects to the website guys press f oh that's hilarious i'm gonna get a message uh why did you send your goons i'm just trying to use your website [Laughter] thank you for f appreciate the f oh no oh no [Laughter] we killed the website okay uh let's see let's swap out of there horrible just horrible just horrible uh okay let's let's do where's worldwide all right new orleans let's go i'm still kind of yeah i didn't even think i guess i'm at the point now where there's kind of enough people that i could dump on one website and just be like oops my bad i did i didn't mean to do that i apologize dwight t thank you for the super chat bud oh man yeah i mean some of these radio websites are literally holding themselves together with like bailing baling wire and twine so yeah uh so now i am on hfradio.org if you want to go blow that one up although i'm not i'm not meaning to uh so let's go to yes seven i'm gonna try for seven three five five wrno worldwide what is that uh i already lose it seven three three five [Music] that sounds fantastic [Music] bbc worldwide let's hit up bbc worldwide 6195 it's barely in there uh i'm going to get real i'm going to get real chancy and try and get radio malaysia on 7295 oh it's it's in there but there's a neighbor next door it's loud let's won't mention the see they got rid of all the blood songs out of their hymnal okay that's ft8 so i'm literally just clicking around uh that's all you have to do with an sdr it's fantastic [Music] i i really i would argue for the sdr play in fact i think one of the slides got screwed up and i want to go back to that for a second before i wrap for the evening let me hop off this frequency so i don't get myself in trouble uh did it did it get there yeah i don't know why this didn't didn't make it but let me let me present this i gotta show you this before i wrap uh i know i'm gonna get questions on rtl sdr dongles i really do like them but but oh and it's gone great hold on there we go uh yeah the thing i wanted to say about the rtl sdr dongles before i wrap the show for tonight and thank you everybody for coming out there to get the best performance on shortwave and hf radio you've got to use something called an upconverter and you know after you after you pay for an up converter and you um you you do all the stuff that goes into getting the dongle work to do direct sampling you've kind of already bought an sdrplay rsp1a and arguably it's it's a lot better because you get access to sdr uno software to to really have a lot of fun with it sdr uno software is a little crazy right now in my desktop but works really really well so that that's what i would i would say for that i really do like that um yeah guys that's about it i really hope that you join us on the after chat um it would be a lot of fun we can talk ham radio or we can talk short wave listening whatever but this obviously is the ham radio crash course so if we want to talk about ham radio that's all part of the thing we're doing here i'm trying as always right the reason why i do these is i i love radio and i love it when people enjoy radio and i don't want it to ever go away and so that's why i do it that's why i continue to have fun with it i have a blast doing these i have a blast talking to you i really thank you all for watching i really mean that it it you know going back to the thing with the awrl award i i'm just really honored and i really appreciate it and the messages i get from you all are just amazing and i just you know thanks is all i can say i really do appreciate everything that you that you you message me ask questions even if you're just asking help you know and i do answer a lot of you i try to answer everybody i really do appreciate it but i do want to say a big thank you to the people who really helped me out and helped the channel out the patrons thank you very much to patreon this was your episode today i hope you enjoyed it i had a lot of fun doing it so all the producers here's the names of all the producers as we roll through here these are the guys that voted for this so if you don't like this go talk to dennis right he's one of the producer level patrons and i appreciate i appreciate all of you thanks so much evan thank you so much for the work you do as a as an admin uh rob zarges also a part of the long island cw club a teacher so many of these people are are deeply there's oof radio thank you michael there's so many there's so many people that are goodgameham radio the names just go on and on and on a lot of people that you either watch on youtube or are involved in in long ncw club or the hammered crash course so many people just thank you so much i appreciate it you go way beyond helping me out with the channel but you're also helping out ham radio which you you deserve a standing ovation so here let me stand up for all the all the patrons thank you very much i really do appreciate it thank you yeah i uh yeah thank you thank you everybody too in the chat i really appreciate all the kind words and comments it's a it's a blast i mean it you know the only reason i do it is because it's fun and i and i really like it and and you guys keep showing up so i'll keep doing it if you guys keep coming out well i'll probably do it if you don't come out because that's where i started right like everybody else on youtube we all started with no views right uh mike n8yo good comment says that the sdr play is a 12 bit adc which is an audio digital converter if i could if i recall correctly it's either 12 or 14 which leads to better dynamic range you are 100 accurate the sdr play is uh the way to go i think it is absolutely the best solution for using sdrs and getting started with them 100 bucks i know it's it's it's more than you'd pay for a handheld like you know a box that you'd put on a desk and play with everybody loves that but you really get a lot of control out of it again like let me let me so we're all those peaks are signals radio signals right so ah that's ham radio there's a contest going on by the way let's let's dive into that really quick because i can't get a copyright strike on that so i'm zooming in look at that so there's a cw contest going on let's flip it i just changed the mode to cw that's what i did that's too fast for me that's too fast for me that's even faster i need a slow contest i need a 15 words per minute contest yeah it's too fast i can't but like this is an example of just the awesome stuff you can do with sdr so i always try to remember or recommend it to people and most the videos i do where i go to a computer or something and i show what i'm hearing it's it's using something like an sdr play let me drop this down a little bit i'm just having fun doing this right now okay we're gonna 7435 [Music] i'm sorry i didn't mean to blow up your website that was uh that was ham radio by the way i can flip it over to ham's lower and then go to 40. and so there's all so this is all the cw stuff that we're just looking at this is ft8 it's always the lighthouse in whatever band you're on you see the 15 second br the 15 second chunk and then it stops 15 seconds stops 15 seconds stops here's single sideband [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] big bear that's where my dad lives [Applause] and we can't hear the other side all right enough fun let's go over the super the uh after chat hey everybody i super appreciate you watching i really do thank you for carving out a bit of your time every weekend to talk with me about radios this is obviously not a ham radio video really but having fun with receivers is always an interesting thing you should be doing and thinking about i um like i said i i got my start in radio i got my start with shortwave not cb like a lot of people do nothing wrong with either way but that was me that was my exposure to radio and so i just love kind of hunting around on the bands for whatever interesting stuff i can find out there so yeah i hope i hope i shared some of that with you so you'll find it interesting and maybe go enjoy that for yourself all right i am josh ki 6 naz thank you so much for watching the ham radio crash course until i talk to you again 73s [Music] [Music] [Music] what are you all doing still watching you should go be joining the discord thanks again everybody [Music] you

Channel: Ham Radio Crash Course

Views: 30,707

Keywords: ham radio, how to get your technician license, what to do with ham radio, having fun with ham radio, how to run a ham radio net, hoshnasi, introduction to ham radio, ham radio basics, amateur radio, amateur radio antenna, ham radio antenna, operating HF, hf radio antenna, ham radio review, amateur radio review, emergency communications, amateur radio communication plan, shortwave radio, swling

Id: SYJosdZiGRI

Length: 77min 28sec (4648 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 06 2021