- Joined
- Jun 26, 2006
- Messages
- 145
I just picked up a BCD536HP. I was really impressed at first; it appears quite sensitive and really pulls in the weak signals. It's plugged into a cheap discone I threw together in my attic. It sits beside a Yaesu ham rig with a high-gain vertical, and improbably pulls in weak signals better than that.
However, I'm beginning to think this is a bad thing. I've been playing with the 'Discover' feature and am finding signals all over the place that are plainly at the wrong place. In the 2-meter ham band, there's a mashup of a paging transmitter and NOAA weather radio (which is at least 20 miles away); clearly intermod. I've found my local EMS provider on at least 5 UHF frequencies in a 1 MHz span; they're only licensed for one of them, and none of my radios can hear the other 4. The EMS frequency is 5 Watts out and the transmitter is several miles away.
I live in the suburbs, in a bit of a valley. And I don't live near a radio tower or anything. No other radio I've owned has had this problem here. Curious if this is a known issue/defect, or if I'm just unlucky? I just realized it has an attenuator I can switch in, which I'll try, but it seems silly that it'd be necessary to achieve normal operation in what's not really a high-RF environment.
However, I'm beginning to think this is a bad thing. I've been playing with the 'Discover' feature and am finding signals all over the place that are plainly at the wrong place. In the 2-meter ham band, there's a mashup of a paging transmitter and NOAA weather radio (which is at least 20 miles away); clearly intermod. I've found my local EMS provider on at least 5 UHF frequencies in a 1 MHz span; they're only licensed for one of them, and none of my radios can hear the other 4. The EMS frequency is 5 Watts out and the transmitter is several miles away.
I live in the suburbs, in a bit of a valley. And I don't live near a radio tower or anything. No other radio I've owned has had this problem here. Curious if this is a known issue/defect, or if I'm just unlucky? I just realized it has an attenuator I can switch in, which I'll try, but it seems silly that it'd be necessary to achieve normal operation in what's not really a high-RF environment.