Shortwave Receiver for the Car

[spongella]

This looks like a great product, hope it comes to fruition.


http://www.carshortwaveradio.com/

 

[KE4EST]

Interesting.

 

[Magic Static]

Talk about a "niche" market. Besides that, SW is all about the antenna which makes it a poor choice for mobile applications. I actually have a SW receiver somewhere, AM/FM/SW/TV, but I don't remember ever tuning in anything on it. I sure wouldn't be locking in on that "Romanian" station

 

[Balock]

I remember many years ago there were SW radios for your cars which were basically upconverters for SW to MW, allowing you to listen on your builtin AM radio. Just mount one under the dash, hook up the antenna and power leads and you were in business.

 

[lost_mesa]

Back in the late 60s a friend had a stock Blaupunkt radio in his VW that was AM/FM/SW.

 

[Titanium]

Owned a 1969 Opel GT with a Blaupunkt Kohn LW/AM/FM/SW.

 

[spongella]

A company (think it was the Herbert Salch Co.) made a gadget called the Tun-A-Verter that converted your car's radio to either the low or high VHF band. Ads were in the back of '60's Popular Mechanics.

MFJ and Vectronics still sell SW converters I think.

 

[Radioguy41]

They claim it's all digital. If it is you won't hear anything, SW is almost exclusively analog and unless your FM radio is digital you won't receive the transmission from the converter either. I suspect they actually mean all solid state with DSP but they really should know the difference.

This little blurb tells me they don't know what they're talking about:

"While conventional wisdom says that a shortwave antenna must be "big" and mounted high on the vehicle to work well, this doesn't necessarily apply for shortwave receive operation, especially when international shortwave broadcast stations operate with a minimum of 50 kilowatts of power and with high gain antennas. "

I hold my Ham license and have multiple receivers and xmitters and there is absolutely a corelation between antenna length and what freqs you can receive. What does the xmitter having a "high gain" antenna mean exactly? "High gain" is a term used for reception, not transmission. One more thing, high power international xmitters are dropping like flies and except for China and Cuba you have to dig deep to find anything worth listening to and you won't find it on that thing.

 

[lfp302]

Not to mention all of the possible sources of interference in a vehicle.

 

[Jim S.]

You can actually get good shortwave reception on a small antenna, if it's an active antenna like the PA0RDT Mini Whip. But it's super-sensitive to interference, not to mention that it works best away from large metal objects...

They do claim that they have a DSP noise blanker, but every time I've ever used a noise blanker on any interference strong enough to actually hinder intelligibility, it's trashed the audio so bad I didn't want to listen to it for any length of time anyway.

The other funky thing I noticed on their website is that they claim that they didn't bother to implement SSB reception due to increased cost. If it's all done with DSP, there shouldn't have been any additional cost other than the one-time cost of developing the code, which should be pretty much a textbook case by now...

 

[spongella]

I give the guy credit though for coming out with something that is rare these days. On shortwave there's still plenty to listen to even though many of the major b'casters have opted for on-line streaming. He's definitely taking the road less traveled, and I admire him for that. Agree that SSB reception would be great for hams and for utility station afficionados. If he adds that, might get one. Hopefully one of the magazines or SW blogs will get ahold of one and do a review. Only problem I can see is tuning that dial back and forth while driving to hunt down a station like 4XZ for some real fast code practice or some other station like W1AW. Might lead to distracted driving hi hi.

All the previous comments are valid and utterly worthwhile, I'll bet he could use the feedback while the project is in its larval stages.

 

[Balock]

I wish he would include a more agile FM transmitter in the unit. We have a strong independent station on 88.3MHz (KABF) which could wipe out reception of a weak transmission on 88.1MHz.

 

[kc1ih]

That ad reminds me of the infomercials for Clear TV !