Online shortwave radios

[Ed Joseph]

This site shows all the "KiwiSDR" receivers across the globe. Some are better than others in terms of local noise and reception. But you can find a software defined radio online on pretty much every continent. I find this fascinating. Click on a marker and it will pop p a box describing the receiver, then click on the link (I always do "open in new tab")...

http://rx.linkfanel.net/

My faves are the one in Fenton (ten miles from me, duplicates the reception of my Grundig Sat 800 on a 35' sloper almost perfectly), the Arctic SDR and one in Central Italy. You can record audio very easily as well as simple decoding of SSTV images and other formats.

[Turkeytop]

I haven't tried that yet. One of these days I'll have to swallow my pride.

[Ed Joseph]

I had the same issue, even worse... if no tubes, it's not a radio. But I remember well in my younger days, wishing I could sit at a radio far away, and this is it. I still have too many radios, and I still use them. This just helps streamline the search a lot. You can see the signals on the display from DC to 30 MHz. Zooming in gives you all the signals which you can simply click on to listen to. But sometimes, I might want to actually hear clearly the program that's originating from 7500 miles away, Like the last BBC Antarctic Winter broadcast, for instance. I could hear it locally, but with much noise and QRN. An SDR twenty miles south of the Wooferton UK TX site gave me local radio signal with zero fading and noise.

And one-click recording is awesome... no fiddling around with patch cables, sound card input issues or mixer settings.

[CurlyHoward]

Thanks for sharing the link Ed. I was playing on that site earlier, listening to the shortwave receiver based in Farmington Hills. It doesn't quite have the same magic as tuning your own radio in the dark, no, but if you're listening to a muezzin sing in Arabic on the 21 meter band you can click over to the HFCC listings and know you're listening to Saudi Arabia. In the "good old days" you'd just have to hope Passport to World Band Radio or the World Radio TV Handbook listings weren't outdated yet.

[Ed Joseph]

I hunt mainly for pirates and weak offshore signals. WRTH wasn't a whole lot of help in those areas. I also find them quite useful for observing propagation as you can watch a range of frequencies at once. You can also record from them with one click and download it when you're done.

One caveat.. some people simply do not think much of their investment, and leave their kiwis online even though they have S8 noise floors and are totally useless... If I had that issue, I'd at least take it offline.