OK via Es

Wednesday morning, I did the weekly shopping. I had the car radio tuned to WLNG on 92.1 MHz and as I descended from Compounce Mountain down to ESPN-land, I lost WLNG and heard two other stations vying for the channel.

Five minutes later (1345 UTC), I arrived at my first stop and sat in the car trying to identify the stations, one Spanish, the other English. I had no luck identifying the Spanish station, but I did ID the English station: KTBT in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, transmitting 27kW, 1300 miles to the west-southwest!

A Dog's Life

Here is a photo of Daisy, one of the occupants of this QTH. She went to the beach today, while I cleaned the garage! Lucky dog!

WWV 25 MHz in the log

Since posting this story about WWV's experimental 25 MHz broadcast, I have been checking 25 MHz regularly. Saturday morning (June 23 at 1513 UTC), I finally was able to hear it here in Wolcott, CT. Signal was an S-6 with the 80-meter inverted Vee antenna and barely audible with the HyGain 18AVT/WB-A vertical antenna. Receiver was an ICOM IC-R8600.

ICOM AD-55NS AC Adapter

When I purchased my ICOM IC-R8600 receiver, I also purchased its AC adapter, the ICOM AD-55NS.

After using the pair for a few days, I was not happy. The AC adapter generated noise that I could hear across the LW and AM bands and beyond. As expected, the noise was much worse when the receiver’s preamp was enabled.

The noise went away when I swapped the AC adapter with an MFJ 25 Amp switching power supply, so I shipped the AC adapter back to the dealer for a replacement (assuming that the unit was defective) or for a refund (assuming that the unit was not defective).

The dealer tested the unit and said it was operating "normally" and was not defective, so I received a refund which I used to purchase an Astron MS-35M 35-Amp linear power supply. Admittedly, the Astron was overkill for the IC-R8600, but I also needed it to power other equipment in the shack. And so far, I have not detected any noise being generated by the Astron.

In the mail...

This arrived in the mail today!