In the World of the High Tech Redneck, the Graybeard is the old guy who earned his gray by making all the mistakes, and tries to keep the young 'uns from repeating them. Silicon Graybeard is my term for an old hardware engineer; a circuit designer. The focus of this blog is on doing things, from radio to home machine shops and making all kinds of things, along with comments from a retired radio engineer, that run from tech, science or space news to economics; from firearms to world events.
Monday, March 28, 2016
Podcast is Up
At the usual places for the Gun Blog Variety Podcast, episode 84, with part 3 of my overview of receivers, this time focusing on what you can hear with a shortwave and SSB receiver, like the popular CountyComm GP-5/SSB.
Yeah, it had very good sensitivity, and more than adequate selectivity, but I just couldn't zoom around the bands very easily.
One of my wife's best friends is just barely getting started in "prepping" (she's pretty liberal, so she calls it "earthquake preparedness"!), so I gave it to her, as she and her husband didn't have a battery powered radio of any kind at all.
I spent an hour or two with them going over how to use it, and emphasizing to ALWAYS take the batteries out when they were done using it.
I had the "NON BFO" version of that receiver and gave it away.
ReplyDeleteJust too damn hard to tune it without a keypad!
There are some reasonable ways to tune it without a keypad, but I never met a radio that cried out for keypad more than these!
DeleteYeah, it had very good sensitivity, and more than adequate selectivity, but I just couldn't zoom around the bands very easily.
DeleteOne of my wife's best friends is just barely getting started in "prepping" (she's pretty liberal, so she calls it "earthquake preparedness"!), so I gave it to her, as she and her husband didn't have a battery powered radio of any kind at all.
I spent an hour or two with them going over how to use it, and emphasizing to ALWAYS take the batteries out when they were done using it.