💾 Archived View for zaibatsu.circumlunar.space › ~solderpunk › phlog › radio-updates.txt captured on 2023-01-29 at 15:59:50.
⬅️ Previous capture (2023-01-29)
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Radio updates ------------- 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