Peter's DX Corner

The wonderful world of listening to the radio

Month: June 2024 (Page 3 of 3)

LA music lovers: Isle of music on air this weekend

June 5, 2024 / / 0 Comments

From the Isle of Music, June 2024

On June 8, 2024, we will feature music from the winning albums in the Fusión Alternativa (“No me formes crisis by Toques del Río) and Nueva Trova plus Notas Discográficas (“Universos” by Tony Ávila y Su Grupo) categories of Cubadisco 2024

Times & Frequencies are:

1700-1800 UTC 9670 kHz with beam E-F towards South Asia

1900-2000 UTC 3955 & 6070 kHz (omnidirectional for Europe and beyond)

2300-2400 UTC 3955 kHz (omnidirectional for Europe and beyond)

All transmissions from Channel 292, Rohrbach, Germany

We will honor reception reports with an eQSL using websdrs IF
1.  The entire hour is reported
2.. Which websdr is clearly specified. 
This will be strictly enforced beginning this month; reports for just a few minutes of the show will be acknowledged with a short note of thanks instead. 

—————

William “Bill” Tilford, Owner/Producer
Tilford Productions, LLC
809 S. 20th ST
Lafayette, IN 47905-1551
email: bill@tilfordproductions.com
phone: 312.351.2330
website: www.tilfordproductions.com

QSL Radio Aktief 828 kHz

June 4, 2024 / / 3 Comments

Radio Aktief is a LPAM station from Tilburg. With 50 Watt listed they have a little bit less power than most LPAMs that operate with 100 Watt. At 60 kilometers to the south of my QTH they are still a relatively easy catch. My guess is that last year Smooth Radio got in their way, otherwise I should have picked them up earlier. But Smooth has left AM…

Radio Aktief is built around a very enthusiastic club of technical people and DJs. RadioKidoki is an alternative station ID. They offer a great variety of music styles, so there is a big chance that you will hear something special. I listened to the “Full Experience Show” with a lot of alternative rock, sometimes almost psychedelic.

eQSL from Radio Aktief

I sent my report to contact@radio828.nl . Within a day I received an email and eQSL, and yesterday I received a couple of nice flyers by “snail mail”.

Nice set of Radio Aktief flyers received by regular mail! Thank you!

Sporadic E conditions… finally!

June 3, 2024 / / 2 Comments

I was already checking the FM band almost every day to see if there were some Sporadic E (Es) conditions. On the FM list site I saw some colleagues making receptions from the Baltic a few days ago. But I didn’t receive a thing. Unfortunately in that direction my view is blocked by an apartment building. Between South East and West however I do have a relatively clean line of sight. But many of you know how it is: you start to doubt your set-up and coax connections if nothing materializes.

Yesterday afternoon the FM band almost exploded however. From 1400 h UTC I heard multiple stations. Initially from Algeria and Tunisia, towards the evening from Italy. I still have to browse through my recordings on the Elad FDM S3 (the first time that I tried to make 24 MHz full band width recordings) and see how that worked out. But below you can see what I already logged in parallel on the ICOM R8600. The antenna is a 5 elements Yagi at 7 meters.

Only problem is that in Italy many stations have multiple locations on the same frequency. So I guess that my receptions from Northern Italy are in fact from locations a little bit more to the centre of Italy around Rome. This makes more sense for a single hop. But I’m learning as I go.

Es logs on June 2nd, 2024.

87.6 ALG Radio Laghouat
88.2 ALG Chaîne 2
88.5 I RAI Radio1
87.5 I Radio Maria
87.6 ALG Chaîne 3
88.3 E COPE
88.4 I RTL 102.5
88.0 TUN Radio Zitouna FM
89.1 I RAI Radio1
88.6 I Radio Radicale
95.1 I Radio Maria
101.9 I Dimensione Suono Roma
107.3 I Radio Radicale
92.0 I Radio Kiss Kiss
91.8 I RDS
105.1 I Radio Kiss Kiss
94.6 I RAI Radio1

QSL WDR5 Langenberg 88.8 MHz

June 2, 2024 / / 0 Comments

At the start of this post I want to make clear that I don’t intend to make jokes about the very kind people of WDR5. Read my explanation at the end of this post.

Last year I was testing my FM antenna… more about that later. I came across WDR5 Langenberg, Germany on 88.8 MHz. As I read somewhere that they were still issuing dedicated WDR5 QSLs I decided to send a report to wdr5@wdr.de. Two days later I received a polite email:

Vielen Dank für Ihr Interesse am Programm von WDR 5.
Bitte haben Sie Verständnis dafür, dass die Bearbeitung Ihrer E-Mail ggf. etwas Zeit in Anspruch nehmen kann.

If you don’t speak German: “Thanks for your interest, asking for your understanding that it might take a while”.

Two weeks ago I realized myself that I never got answer. So I sent a kind reminder. Within a day I received this reply:

Da Ihr Anliegen etwas sehr komplex ist, geben wir dieses Intern weiter und werden uns nochmal bei Ihnen melden!

This translates as “your question is quite complicated… we will forward and let you know”.

And last week I received a nice fully detailed letter from the Technical Information Department to QSL WDR5 Langenberg:

QSL Letter for my reception of WDR5 Langenberg on 88.8 MHz

As promised at the start of this post, my take away:
I am very grateful that WDR5 is still sending out physical letters to QSL reception reports from listeners. There are very few stations that still do so, and I applaud them for this. But the correspondence does show how unfamiliar the front office public relation desk is with anything related to “technical questions”. Steve Canney, former engineer and QSL Manager of CFRB/CFRX Toronto made me aware of this. And you can see that the reply is from the Technical Department. This is why, when sending QSL requests to bigger stations, I always try to direct them to Engineering or Transmitter Engineering departments.

To finish this post, the beautiful QSL card I received in 1980 for my reception WDR Langenberg on 1593 kHz medium wave… those were the days!

QSL MRCC Lisboa 2187.5 kHz

June 1, 2024 / / 0 Comments

On my second attempt I received a fully detailed email, with their nice logo, to QSL MRCC Lisboa 2187.5 kHz. I received them acknowledging a DSC test of RoRo ship “Grande Brasile” on its way from Portugal to Senegal. I sent my report to mrcc.lisboa@marinha.pt . Please note that I edited the picture of the QSL email to remove phone numbers etc. for privacy reasons.

QSL email for MRCC Lisboa on 2187.5 kHz
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