Radio, DX-ing, Linux, Hacking & more…
Posts written only in English language.
XDR-GTK v0.3.1 is out. New features include:
The last weekend of September featured fantastic troposhperic ducting conditions in Central Europe. This time I got stations from southern Germany, Czech Republic, Austria, Croatia, Slovenia and Hungary! We are used to receive stations mainly from northern directions here in Poland, as the terrain is flat and the nearby Baltic Sea is a perfect enviroment for tropo. Every year we listen to stations from Denmark, Sweden and possibly other countries depending on conditions, location and equipment. DX from southern countries is limited due to the hilly terrain. However, reception of Croatia or Slovenia is possible even in central Poland via aircraft scatter, when a plane is at 12km+ height over the Polish-Czech border.
Just like almost every year in the past, I have visited Polish coast at the Baltic sea this summer. My QTH – Chłapowo near Władysławowo (JO94ET) was very well-elevated. It is over 40 m ASL, 3 m AGL and less than 200 m to the coast! I took my 5-el Yagi designed by Brian Beezley, K6STI. Moderate gain, F/R 20dB over entire band and small dimensions make this antenna perfect for portable usage. All elements are assembled with wing nuts, so it can be ready to go in just a few minutes.
XDR-GTK v0.3 is now available. The XDR-I2C update via Arduino IDE is also required this time.
New features:
An excellent opening to Scandinavia took place on Sunday morning. Probably one of the best I have ever seen in this direction. This time I used 2x 9-el K6STI for reception in vertical polarization instead of Körner 19.3 in H. Full log of almost 200 identified stations is available on FMLIST.
Update – only three days have passed since a massive opening from Scandinavia and the CCIR band was again full of signals from Finland. I received lots of local stations, not only YLEs as usually. Some stations from Russia, Norway and Sweden also came in. Full log is available on FMLIST and contains almost 200 identified stations, including few unlisted transmitters. Antenna: Körner 19.3 H
I have recently come up with an idea for improving static RDS PS decoding. It’s very simple, we’re using RDS data up to 5-bit correction and each PS character is replaced only with another that has the same error correction level or lower. The Es season is coming, so this might be helpful for some countries that don’t mainly use dynamic PS names – like UK, Sweden, Finland, Germany, Czech Republic, Slovakia… I also added an option to display the RDS PS in greyscale colors depending on the error correction level.
I have finally managed to make XDR-GTK working under OS X! Complete binary of 0.2.2 version is available under