newbie product questions

[Swiftsailor]

Hey all,
I'm no radio-head, except that I like my FM in remote places. I just joined this forum in hope of making the best possible purchase for my situation.

We have a cabin in the SW foothills of Mt. St Helens, and are looking for a portable receiver that would reliably deliver the following:

1. clear FM
2. alternate FM antenna option
2. quality sound
3. durability
4. external input (iPod)
5. additional stereo speaker output

We get FM in the car on site, but portable radios pull only fuzzy AM. I am posting on this thread, hoping that someone will understand the air-wave challenges of the region and be able to recommend a radio in the dollar range above.

We bought a Sangean PR-D5 based on raving reviews on it reception. Tried it out yesterday and got no FM and only fuzzy AM. We're returning it for money back ASAP.

Looking into the following:
Kaito KA1103 $70.
Grundig/Eaton S350 DL $90.
Sony ICF-SW7600600 $130.

One other factor is that the cabin is off-grid, which means the more battery friendly, the better.

Thanks ahead for any and all suggestions.

Peter

 

[lowboy654]

I am not in the area that you are talking about but I use this from time to time and it works great.
Grundig G5 shortwave radio

 

[SCPD]

The Sony 7600gr is a good little radio but it doesn't really provide an alternate antenna. (It does, but it's a poor choice.)

I would personally suggest an older radio - the Grundig Satellit 800.. you can find these on EBay for $200-$300 used (some are like new) and not only is the speaker fidelity excellent, but it has a good alternate antenna option - a true UHF (SO-239) plug.

Here's a link to the 800 model. It's older but the audio output is excellent.

Grundig Satellite 800, Tecsun ham-2000

Then you can get yourself an outdoor antenna (plus RG-8 coax from radio shack) and you're in business.

Diamond D-130J Discone Antenna

(Radio Shack also sells a discone antenna. It looks exactly like the Diamond model.)

RadioShack® Outdoor Scanner/Ham Discone Antenna - RadioShack.com

Grundig makes a new model - the 750 - which is very similar to the older 800. The one difference being the external antenna jack is a BNC jack - which just needs a $5 adapter to use with coax.

Grundig Satellit 750 Radio Receiver

PS. Check out youtube.com for examples of both of these. There are a lot of video clips to watch and hear the audio output.

***

This may be overkill for what you're asking. You could buy say the Sony 7600gr and hook up a long (> 50ft) to the external antenna jack. That should get you decent reception. There are ways to make it work cheaply, but the finish product won't be as pretty.

 

[jilljaen]

Adding a field to the radio ref data

Seattle MOT has almost 50 talk groups. The best scanners available now only accept 20 groups per system.

Obviously I either need to create multiple systems to cover Seattle OR I need to group the talk id's into something more manageable. Preferrably something easy to select on the scanner once it's programmed.

So I can go by sorting on the tag column (about 17 groups) OR even better If I could tag the groups with their Washington District ID I could select them based on area (and perhaps even geotag them).

Can I get Radio ref to create a new column in the db for 'alternate tag grouping' ? and Then we can feed district id's into it for Washington state. Alternately I would tag them with general cardinal directions from city or county center. So I think political districts are better.

 

[jilljaen]

Hacked the Seattle MOT database

It took some work (8 hours or so) but I've reoganized the Seattle MOT service into something much more useable for me. Basically I took the entire talk group list and added a political district tag to the data. Then it was just a matter of getting the data organized into the appropriate districts. For county wide stuff I used district 0.

So far it works out pretty well. My talk groups came out to be the following;

KC0 Court
KC0 ITS
KC0 PD
KC0 SO (Sheriff)
KC0 Fire
KC32 North
KC41 East
KC5-48 East
KC11 SE
KC33 SW
KC47 SE
KC30 South
KC0 Transit
KC0 Event
KC0 Med
KC0 Muni

It makes me happy and I finally have control over Seattle MOT on my scanner. <yea!>