Radio updates
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Not long at all after the war broke out in Ukraine, somebody at
my workplace organised the collection of a wide range of items for
donation, via a local church group. This was not stuff to be given
to refugees, who had then only just started arriving locally in
significant numbers, but stuff that was actually going to be sent
into Ukraine, as soon as possible, before an anticipated closure
of borders. The church group supplied a "wish list" which included
things like first aid supplies and night vision equipment (which
apparently is easy enough for civilians in non-war-torn countries
to buy for hunting etc.), which made it pretty clear that this
stuff was even likely to end up be given to soldiers. It was a
sobering thought, the prospect of an army fighting for survival
using at least partially second-hand civilian gear. I donated
a lot of the camping gear I had used previously for S24O trips,
as this was a lot less useful to me now that I have been stripped
of my Everyman's Rights. We also donated a lot of heavy duty cold
weather clothing which we had bought and used in Finland but which
was now overkill here in slightly more Southern climes, as well as
pretty much the entirety of our home medical supplies.
I donated one other thing, too: the Tecsun PL-310ET LW/MW/SW/FM radio
I bought in New Zealand more than five years ago when I first got
interested in shortwave DXing. I did not expect the war to last
this long, and I didn't expect the Ukrainians to mount such an
effective resistance, either. In the early days I was genuinely
worried that large swathes of communication infrastructure would
be, within mere days, either destroyed or taken over by occupying
forces, leaving the Ukrainian people with, in the absolute best
case scenario, a heavily censored internet connection with every
packet routed via Russia. Apparently I was not the only one
with this concern because very quickly even some mainstream media
outlets paid attention to the fact that the BBC and various other
broadcasters were resurrecting long-dormant shortwave transmitters
and programs to get outside information into Ukraine. Some even
predicted a sort of shortwave renaissance in light of the rapidly
deteriorating global geopolitical situation, although some industry
insiders threw cold water on this idea, too. At any rate it really
seemed like a good idea to me at the time, so I sent off my radio,
along with a big pack of fresh AA batteries and a hand-written list
of frequencies and UTC times for Ukrainian-language broadcasts.
In actuality, none of these scenarios seems to have played out even
a little. In fact, very much to the contrary, it feels like it's
been possible for anybody in the West to follow the whole darn war in
real time at point blank range via smartphone-enabled social media.
Presumably information is flowing in the opposite direction just
as freely. So who knows, maybe my radio ended up in the hands
of somebody who had absolutely no idea why they were supposed to
want it and has not tuned in a single broadcast. It feels funny
to say "I hope not", because that kind of implies I *wanted* folks
hunkered down in a blacked-out metro station to be totally cut-off
from the outside world by all other means, which of course I don't.
But it would be kind of a sad fate for a great little radio which
I took all over the world with me and heard all kinds of things with.
Whatever my radio's fate, 2022 was the first year in a long
time I found myself not in possession of a good portable radio.
It's true my shortwave interest had waned a little over the years,
but I actually caught the mediumwave DXing bug early in the year,
or actually probably in late 2021, so I definitely wanted to
rectify this. I was initially very keen on upgrading to Tecsun's
newer PL-330. This is in roughly the same size and price bracket
as my old PL-310, with the important and attractive difference that
it features SSB support, previously reserved for their higher tier
PL-6xx and PL-8xx models. But the more I read and thought the more I
vacillated on whether or not to grab one of these. The first really
big turn off was that the PL-330 runs not on AAs or AAAs but on one
of those flat slab lithium ion batteries that ye olde Nokia phones
used to use. My feelings on weird non-standard batteries are pretty
well documented by now[1]. I will grant that, as far as weird battery
choices go, these BL-5C batteries are far from the worst choice
and aren't likely to disappear from the market any time soon.
It's leagues better than the smartphone industry's approach of
every single individual device having its own bespoke battery.
But I don't understand why they didn't go for 18650s. Furthermore,
as is *always* the case with modern DSP radios out of China, I read
all sorts of varying and conflicting accounts online about weird
interface bugs or undocumented features or whatever, which depend
crucially on exact firmware versions, which is a critical detail that
most EU-based resellers will not bother specifying for you (when I
bought the PL-310ET in NZ I bought it directly from a well-known and
trusted Hong Kong-based reseller with a solid reputation for always
shipping the latest firmware version, but NZ is one of those nice
countries that doesn't financially punish ordinary people for daring
to shop overseas for things in quantities of one for personal use).
I have very little patience for this kind of nonsense nowadays.
Design an interface, test it, debug it, document it, and *then*
release the product. Duh.
Heck, even in the complete absence of firmware bugs, which to the
best of my knowledge was the case for my PL-330, I found Tecsun's
user interface pretty irritating. I have to admit in my SW days I
was a pretty darn lazy DXer, and I'd just throw out a long wire and
press the magic "scan" button and let the PL-330 do a bandscan for me
and decide where there were and were not listenable signals and then
I'd just flip through 'em. When I started experimenting with MW I
quickly realised that the auto scanning feature was happily skipping
over signals that I'd have rather it stopped on, and so I tried to
switch to traditional manual bandscanning. It's not a huge band,
after all. But in manual tuning mode, my PL-330 moved in steps
of 1 kHz per click of the encoder wheel when turning it slowly,
or either 5 or 10kHz (I forget) per click when turning it quickly.
In Europe where the stations are spaced 9kHz apart, this is basically
unworkable (everything I read online suggests that the PL-330 *does*
tune in 9 kHz steps, but I was never able to get mine to. Maybe they
added this in later firmware versions). The shiny feature-bragging
sticker on the front of the radio reassured me that it had however
many hundred preset memory locations (radios always brag prominently
about this, which may have made sense in 198x, but seems kind of
silly these days), so I thought I'd hack my way around this by
spending one painstaking evening tuning through the band with nine
slow clicks and save each possible MW channel in its own memory
slot, so I could scroll through them quickly and effortlessly.
And that was how I found out that the however many hundred memory
slots are actually pre-allocated to certain bands, you only get so
many LW slots and so many MW slots and so many FM slots, and so on.
And there weren't enough MW slots to cover the whole band. Argh!
Not to mention that switching between the three modes, of manually
tuning, of tuning through presets, or of tuning through auto-scan
detected stations, was awfully clunky, with some steps involving
short presses of the buttons which, if accidentally held long
enough to count as long presses, would trigger a time-consuming,
non-interruptable re-scan. I don't have the radio in front of
me any more and cannot remember the details of how this worked,
but I *do* remember that I once read the relevant manual pages,
with the radio in front of me, thought about for it for 60 seconds,
and successfully devised an alternative interface using exactly
the same number of buttons which was objectively superior.
At the same time that I was bumping into these limitations, I was
also experimenting with my first cheap and cheerful homebrew MW
receivers (you will, I hope, read a *lot* more from me about homebrew
radio projects in 2023 - they are where the vast majority of my
technical creative energy went this year), all of which featured
varactor-tuned front-ends, with the varactor biasing voltage
derived from a 10-turn potentiometer. These crude radios where
nowhere near as sensitive or as selective as the Tecsun, of course,
but I do not have polite words to describe the extent to which the
user interface and user experience beat the pants off those of the
Tecsun. Slowly and carefully tuning a radio by turning a large,
knurled, preferably metal knob with a smooth action behind it is
the *only* way to operate a radio. It ticks all the same ineffable
but vital boxes that manually focussing a good vintage camera does.
Experience that just once and you never want to deal with autofocus
ever again and your soul will ache just a lil' every time you do.
In both the camera and radio cases, the manual option is slow and
fiddly in a *good* way, a way that demands but also richly rewards
just the smallest amount of attention and deliberation. It turns
you into an *active participant* in the process and makes you feel
*connected* to the machine. You can do it with your eyes closed!
Well, the tuning you can, not the focussing, obviously. You can
tune with your eyes closed and the radio itself almost disappears
from your consciousness, your wrist and the tips and joints of your
thumb and fingers become directly connected to your ears. No digital
user interface can aspire to even get close to that experience.
It's impossible in principle.
So between my distaste for non-cylindrical batteries, my concern
over at worst buggy and at best unbearably clunky digital user
interfaces, and my general reticence to buy new electronics of
any kind these days, I soon gave up on the notion of replacing my
Tecsun with another, and also, for the same reason, decided against
trying the XHDATA D-808, which has received a lot of praise from MW
DXers (not as much as various C. Crane radios have, but good luck
finding one of those for sale outside the US), and started exploring
vintage options. Before long I ended up having bought, for about
half the price the PL-330 would have cost me, a Sony ICF-7600A,
roughly as old as I am. The Sony 7600 series is positively legendary
amongst radio geeks (Stephan Großklaß has an *excellent* fansite[2]),
but most models in the series, and certainly the most popular ones,
have digital user interfaces (they are PLL-synthesised analogue
receivers, of course, not DSP units like Tecsun and co.'s offerings,
but interface-wise this is irrelevant). My all-analogue 7600A is the
early 80's dual-conversion follow-up to the late 70's
single-conversion 7600 (no A), itself the first truly portable
shortwave receiver - at least by modern standards of portability,
kind of in the same way that it's hard to call those old Kaypro
computers "portable" with a straight face once you've seen a laptop.
It's larger and heavier than my PL-330 was, no question. I kind
of doubt that it's substantially larger or heavier than any of the
PL-6xx or PL-8xx radios, although maybe it is just a little. It is,
in any case, unquestionably portable *enough*. It's powered by
four God-fearing AA batteries and the user interface is gloriously,
divinely straightforward. The tuning knob, which turns smoothly
and without backlash, is the only knob on the whole darn thing,
volume being adjusted via a slider. There are buttons to select
the MW, SM and FM bands. Pressing one of these serves to turn the
radio on. There's a dedicated off switch which pops the currently
depressed band button back up. The off switch can slide upwards
where it locks into place as a kind of safety catch against the
radio being turned on while it's in a bag. There's a tone control
switch and that. is. it. Everything you need, nothing you don't.
It has two 3.5mm output jacks, one for headphones and another
with microphone-level output for plugging into a tape recorder.
I haven't tested it yet, but I really hope, and suspect, that
the tape output jack will work well with a MiniDisc recorder.
That'll be a delight, if true. The headphone jack admittedly is
one of those strange mono jacks that pipes sound only to the left
ear of a pair of stereo headphones. I've encountered this before
on other old radio, and it always seems like the strangest design
decision in the world to me. I understand that MW and SW broadcasts
are mono broadcasts, but...whatever was the apparently commonly
perceived downside of playing that one channel through both ears?
Anyway, easily fixed with a passive adaptor. The volume slider on
my unit is a bit crackly, as old potentiometers do tend to get.
I have contact cleaning spray, natch, but I'm always hesitant to
open up small radios which have analogue tuning dials. You never
know until it's too late whether opening the thing up this way
or that will upset some delicate little assembly of springs and
cogs and pulleys and strings and good luck fixing that if it does.
I'd sooner put up with a scratchy pot.
I got the ICF-7600A in particular, rather than any of a great
many other all-analogue multiband radios of similar vintage with
similar interfaces, because I'd read very good things about its MW
performance. The SWLing Post blog opined that "mediumwave may be
its strong suit" [3], and well-known radio geek Jay Allen even
directly compared the 7600A (and some of its PLL brothers) to a
group of more modern radios, including the Tecsun PL-990 and H-501,
and concluded "the Sony’s actually outperformed the Tecsuns
noticeably on AM" [4]. I haven't really made the time yet to put
the ICF-7600A through its paces to see if it lives up to this hype.
I've actually taken it out with me twice on bicycle binocular
astronomy outings, figuring that the two hobbies complement one
another perfectly, as both require being outside far from built-up
areas at night, but both times I've taken the binos out first and
then had trouble pulling my attention away from the skies. I did
a quick ten minute bandscan the second time around and almost
immediately got the UK station Gold on 1548 kHz loud and clear
albeit also mixed with TWR Europe from Grigoriopol. TWR is a
megawatt transmission that is no great challenge to receive, but
for some reason Gold is a really tough catch for me. Other UK
stations are pretty easy, and the only slightly more powerful Lyca
Radio on nearby 1458 kHz often positively booms in, but Gold is
elusive and in fact I've only caught it previously using a frame
antenna with an air-spaced variable capacitor. To receive it this
easily on just a portable's built in loopstick is unprecedented for
me, so I'm inclined to believe the praise from the reviewers is
justified. I look forward to spending more time during the rest of
this winter chasing down stations.
[1]
gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space:70/0/~solderpunk/phlog/lithium-blues.txt
[2]
http://stephan.win31.de/sony7600.htm
[3]
https://swling.com/blog/2019/12/the-sony-icf-7600a-continues-to-impress/
[4]
https://radiojayallen.com/sony-7600-series/
