Hot-rodding your portable SW radio?

[KB2GOM]

With the dearth of affordable desktop SW receivers, and with so many listeners using portables, perhaps folks would like to share their favorite tips and tricks for squeezing the most performance out of their portables.

Favorite external antennas? Other goodies?

I'll get the ball rolling with this:

Jock reviews the BHI Compact In-Line Noise Eliminating Module

Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor, Jock Elliott, who shares the following guest post: The noise, the neighbor, and the box By Jock Elliott, KB2GOM Imagine the annual meeting of an internationa…

swling.com

Yes, I know that it costs much more than many SW portables, but sometimes it really does help. (And I paid for it with my own money).

 

[TAC4]

Great read and interesting box. I am lucky I have a natural low
noise floor at my location of S1 to S3 units by unplugging alot
of RFI devices in my home and going with tablets only
no computers or monitors. 🚫

I would say my vintage USA made ARCOMM AP4
Active Antenna/Preselector with a 100' wire end feed
antenna is my secret sauce. That and a great pair
of listening headphones like Rolland's RH-5, I can
pull out any weak brodcast signal from the noise
floor no problem.

 

[AB5ID]

Phasing out qrm before it even enters your receiver.

 

[ka3jjz]

A slightly different tac to what TAC4 said would be to use a passive (not active) preselector in between the radio and external antenna. This is particularly useful in urban locations where many portables would overload without riding the gain control constantly (as you would with an active preselector). Doing this will help cut the amount of cross mod some radios will have with lots of FM and TV stations in the vicinity. You would certainly spend a bit of time in tuning, but there are lots of knob twiddlers out there...

Mike

 

[ka3jjz]

A lot of these Chinese portables that are coming out now have noisy power cubes. Replacing that (and perhaps using a couple of ferrites or make a choke to decouple the wire from the transformer to the radio) would clean up this mess.

Mike

 

[Blackswan73]

There are three key features to look for when selecting a new radio
1-RF gain. A definite must for SW
2-Fine tuning down to 1khz
3-Selectable bandwidth filtering
Having these controls at your fingertips, and knowing how to use them will greatly enhance your SW listening experience. Trying to supercharge a Volkswagen class radio is not going to make it perform like a Ferrari. This is why many people don’t stay in the hobby. Not for lack of things to hear, but do to poor equipment

B.S.

 

[KB2GOM]

There are three key features to look for when selecting a new radio
1-RF gain. A definite must for SW
2-Fine tuning down to 1khz
3-Selectable bandwidth filtering
Having these controls at your fingertips, and knowing how to use them will greatly enhance your SW listening experience. Trying to supercharge a Volkswagen class radio is not going to make it perform like a Ferrari. This is why many people don’t stay in the hobby. Not for lack of things to hear, but do to poor equipment

B.S.

Blackswan,

Some radios have an antenna DX, NORMAL, LOCAL switch. In your opinion, would that suffice for the RF Gain function?

 

[Blackswan73]

Not really. One of the tricks of a rf gain is you can adjust it to bring the noise level down to around zero. Then only signals that are above the noise level are heard. Anything in or below the noise level are not heard which wouldn’t be heard anyway even with the rf gain all the way up. Rf gain adjusts the signal level of the rf stage. A local/norm/dx switch is better than no rf signal control but is more of a blanket attenuator and not as useful as a normal rf gain control

B.S.

 

[ka3jjz]

It's nowhere as good as a variable RF Gain control, but you can add a pot and a choke in a little box and give yourself a little protection against static charges getting into the radio. The pot would reduce the amount of RF going into the radio from the antenna, and may work better than a LOCAL / DX / Normal switch that might give too little or too much attenuation. It's discussed here

Static drain for outside long wire antenna

Up until now I've used the old tube radios I collect and restore for DXing. I use a 50' outside wire for my antenna. Static (other than lightning) isn't a problem for tube radios. But I decided I wanted to try one of the new portable radios and ordered a Tecsun PL-880, which should arrive in a...

forums.radioreference.com

Mike