Friday 23 January 2015

Good TP On Medium Wave (BCB)

Early morning (Jan 22) saw BCB conditions vastly improved over what they have been for most of the season. Because I am on the wrong (none-Pacific) side of Vancouver Island, as well as on the eastern shores of Mayne Island, I usually don't listen for Asian signals on my Perseus recordings but a quick check of Thursday's recordings revealed some very solid signals from many Japanese stations, as well as Korea. Most signals were strongest at around 1500Z (7 a.m. local) but were first audible from about 1200Z.

Three of the good performers are shown in the video below:
  • JOBB  828KHz NHK2 Osaka
  • JOAK  594KHz NHK1 Tokyo
  • HLAZ 1566KHz Jeju, South Korea / Far Eastern Broadcasting Company


Numerous other signals, reaching similar strengths were audible throughout the broadcast band on their 9KHz-spaced channels. Interestingly, I had configured my LF inverted-L into a temporary version of a low noise vertical (LNV) by removing all of the loading coil and feeding with an isolating impedance matching transformer. I rather suspect that in this mode it is acting as a normal quarter-wave inverted-L however as its self-resonant frequency, without any loading, is around 1200KHz. Today's conditions were much poorer but several Asian signals were heard once again.

Should conditions improve, the next time I will use my large loop oriented to favor Japan and also take advantage of its ability to null many of the local blowtorch signals from Vancouver, off to the side.

2 comments:

Vasily Ivanenko said...

Thanks for this Steve. Gotta love BCB DXing. -Toddly

Steve McDonald said...

It's always been fun Todd. I started BCB DXing at age 11 if you can believe it! Even snagged a QSL from WBZ in Boston with my little AA5 AC/DC rx.