Long wire experiment
I ran a long wire of a 100 feet or so out into the wilderness out back and out of site of man and got it connected to the TenTec and the Ensemble RXII. It picked up more signal over the other antennas at 20m but one thing is lacking – it could have been performing better at 20m than a 40m dipole so in retrospect more testing is necessary before I switch over to a stealthy long wire for receiving. There was poor excuse for an earth ground but connection of the ground made no difference so the wire was basically ungrounded running straight into a UHF connector, then into a coax feed into the house
On twenty and forty meters it has perhaps about 2 S units of gain over the dipole. The result is that more signal is readable, and traffic that was in the noise floor is raised above it.
Other notes
Lots of activity yesterday afternoon on 20 and 40. Micronesia (kwaj) was very loud, Australia (Melborne) but mainland US seemed relatively weak. The readable stations were using amps of 500 to 1k to be heard.
The SDR with its 96 khz-wide vision was overloaded when a local ham came online on 20m with a kilowatt from a location in Nuuanu about 3 or 4 miles away. It also showed a weak mirror opposite the main signal on the waterfall.
The TT had no problem with the strong signal.
Low signal sensitivity comparisons. The SDR may be a tad more sensitive but the TT is more readable.
The audio on the TT is better than the softrock on the laptop speakers. An external speaker on the laptop helps. The SR has a high pitch audio white noise backdrop whose pitch can be lowered by reducing signal width. The effect is like a speaker in an echo chamber whose size is altered by the signal bandwidth. Lowering bandwidth has the effect of producing a muffled sound so is not much of an improvement. There might be something to improve the audio to remove this as a factor.
Readability of the TT is better than the SR. It has a thicker audio with less electronic sounding artifacts which may help the “hearability ” in the audio output vrs the SR. If the signal is strong, then the difference is negligble.
marksun
kh6dk Works 