OT: Old equipment, radios etc etc for sale

Long Wave is chock full of ADSL

Who the f*ck are you? Jesus incarnate? F*ck off.

I have a couple of R1155 WW2 receivers and an Eddystone 940. All are destined for eBay when I get round to it (and after testing). John

Good points, both of you. It's on the same shelf as a couple of LPs and CDs where I'm listed in the credits (and one, bizarrely, where I'm not) but I suppose I can't expect the kids to have psychic skills and weed them out before all the rest go to the skip.

Nick

In a sort of homage to that chapter in Nevil Shute's novel, On The Beach where the submarine chases half way around the world in search of a random Morse Code transmission, I dragged out my multi-band portable to see if I could find anything, anything at all on Long Wave.

And yes! Somewhere around 170kHz[1] someone was talking in English! Unfortunately, and in keeping with that ultimately pointless submarine voyage in the book, I soon worked out that this was actually a harmonic of TalkSport's medium wave transmission. Which probably tells you more than you ever wanted to know about quality of the little battery-powered radio I keep in case the balloon goes up.

Fortunately, I have at least one working DAB and/or FM radio in every room here so I'll be okay until the balloon really does go up. And I've learned one very important lesson today about portable, multi-band radios: one should check the batteries once in a while.

Nick [1]It's an analogue dial and not very accurate

That was perhaps the most depressing book I ever read.

How can it be a harmonic when its below the MW frequency?

It can't but it can't be an image on a cheap superhet. Talk sport is frequencies between 1053 to 1107kHz so a typical cheap superhet with an IF between 450 and 470kHz there will be image reception in the long wave bands.

Dave

a Harmonic of the local oscillator,

Indeed, with an IF of 465 kHz and LO above there will be an image at

nib

Are your DAB radios capable of handling DAB+?

I think I've got four of 'em and no, they are all just bog-standard DAB.

Why? Are they all about to become obsolete?

Nick

Not much apart from the main BBC channels are still on plain old DAB (MP2 codec). Pretty much everything else is now DAB+. Classic FM changed a couple of years ago. Some of the newer BBC channels such as Radio 3 Unwind are DAB+ too. A DAB radio will appear to tune to these channels but no sound will come out.

To my mind, the biggest error with DAB. No backwards compatibility. No ability to upgrade.

nib

much like the mythical Radio 5 SX Formula1 ?

Agreed. I've got a 25-years old Roberts radio which is only DAB, and is gradually losing stations. I also have another one which is only 13 years old and has the same problem.

BBC R5 SX is still DAB according to my little portable. SX2, SX3 and so on are streaming only.

It was one of the big cricket series going to TalkSport 2 that made me first buy a DAB+ portable. The cars have been DAB+ since at least 2013.

Back in the earlier days of DAB I had a Videologic DAB tuner that didn't see 5 Sports Extra in the main station selection, you had to tune to Radio 5 and then select some sub-channel. I've not seen that anywhere else. The same applied to some part-time Parliament channel and Radio 4.

nib

If you hadn't told me, I probably wouldn't have noticed until everything disappeared. I only tend to listen to two stations and they are both BBC and both are still there.

Nick

Oscillator is usually high, or has that changed in the last 50 years?

There's a couple of weak ones, Poland and Algeria I think. Allouis is still transmitting data (time) on 162, but at about 6dB down on when it had programme.