Friday, November 16, 2012

King´s Village DX-Station October: Radio Z-1 Guayaquil Ecuador 1400


October this year was one of the worst dx-wise as the conditions were quite poor most of the month and improved only in the end of the month. There was, however an opening with some stations from Latin America on October 5th in the beginning of the month.
One of the stations on 1400 from South America is Radio Z-1 Guayaquil Ecuador. The dominant from the L.A. is usually from Peru - Super Radio Callao on 1400 (1399.996) but thanks to the offset of Radio Z-1 (it has been on 1399.94 several years) Z1 is audible also, sometimes with rather good strength. That was the case also on Oct. 5th this year.
A typical situation on 1400 can be seen on this picture showing the carriers of Z1, Radio Callao, Emissora Mariana Bogota  and CBC among others (SDR-radio IQ-analysis 11 Nov.2012).

Saludos a Radio Z1 !

73,TK

Sunday, November 11, 2012

King´s Village DX-Station September: Radio Comas 1300

I have tried Radio Comas since a few years but only some tentative observations have been made during the local sunrise when BBC 1296 has always been transmitting on DRM and blocking the channel very effectively. Now in September as the channel is "free" again it was possible to hear Radio Comas Lima during a pretty good opening to Peru (on Sept. 28th). At the same time about a dozen common peruvians were heard as well, some of them with quite good signal as this one although it seemed there was another Andian station on the channel as well. Unfortunately no other new stations were identified although an intensive investigations were made also by Henrik Klemetz - Thank You HK! One of the UNIDs were on 1330 (a few Herz below) with an "ID" and s/off at around 04.10 utc (Sept. 28th).
Radio Comas was very easy on short waves back in 1990´s - the picture shows the building of Radio Comas (received with a written QSL in 1997).
73,TK

Saturday, November 3, 2012

Testing in two QTHs

At the end of October I finally tested how the new electricity network works at my "Northern QTH" at Haapavesi near the geografical center of Finland. The local electric distributer has finally took away all the open wires (like a big 20 kV wire around the antenna area) and it really means that the power line noise is gone at the QTH! Only one insulator was found on the ground! I hoped they would have left the piles but of course that was not the case - these piles would have been nice masts for long beverage antennas (directed to the NNE @17 degrees). I made some listening tests using a temporary LWOG (250 meters @ 80 degr.) and noted some SEA / FE stations like the big Japanese and a few from the Philippines (on October 19th) like DWXI 1314 (& 1350, 1530).
 At the King´s Village QTH I had to take my LWOG away (waiting the plowing at the area) and installed a delta FLAG using FLG100 units. I works OK, however I prefer LWOG/BOGs as the seems to be more sensitive to low-angle signals. The FLAG works best on SW and could be used on MW as well but it is not as effective for Far East. I have to compare it to the LWOG when I can but the wire again. The fields seems to be very wet now after big amounts of rain.


73,TK