Maximus wrote:

Hello "Hidden",
I live in the Seattle, Washington area, about 15 miles east. I had to move
recently, and am now in an apartment where I cannot have anything outside.
For the time being I am using a little CD magnet mount whip. It doesn't work
as well as the 200 plus feet of wire I had strung between trees where I was
before, but it works. As for reception here, there have been long stretches
of really miserable reception of late, but the west coast always has been
challenging. Whether they beam anything directly at us does not matter. Many
transmissions are beamed toward other areas and we can still get the signal.
The rest is up to mother nature.

What I am thinking of doing is mounting some push pins in the wall and
wrapping wire around that. It may give me better reception than the whip. My
problem here is that there is a great deal of computer generated RF and I
have no way of getting away from it or of filtering it out. I would not give
up on the hobby. It is simply a challenge that requires patience and
ingenuity s. Best Wishes, Maximus.

I lived in a motel for a while (don't ask) and I found that I could get
decent reception with a 30' length of Radio Shack speaker wire duct
taped to the ceiling in a NW-SE pattern. The duct tape will stick if you
tape a piece across the wire and then a piece parallel to the wire on
either side, like so: |-| . I tried push pins but they came out of the
wall, since the walls were cardboard. This was in a heavily populated
area, but granted I didn't have all the computer RF that you do.

I've been playing around with my Degen 1102 and I found that the
supplied external antenna-just a piece of black wire with a jack on the
end-vastly outperforms the whip. The moral: ANY outside wire is better
than a whip.

As for what can be heard out west, Radio Australia's Pacific service can
still be heard on the west coast at various times and freqs-audibility
tends to vary day to day so get a list and just punch in freqs listed
for a particular time until you get a hit, which is what I do if I want
to listen to Oz. Other nations can be heard during their broadcasts to
the eastern US or to the Caribbean, like Spain and the Netherlands, but
these require external wire. VOA is prohibited by law from broadcasting
to the US, always has been, but west coasters can usually pick up their
English broadcasts from various Asian transmitters, like Thailand and
the Philippines, during the morning hours. As for BBC and Deutsche
Welle, those are two stations which indeed no longer broadcast to North
America, but the BBC can usually be heard with transmissions to other
areas.


http://home.earthlink.net/~damienmj/index.htm

wrote in message
. 105.130...
Wow, I'm just getting back into listening to shortwave radio after being
out of it for quite a few years. I had a crap (and I do mean crap)
Magnavox "boom box" that had shortwave on it years ago (1988?) and I
remember the utter joy I held, living in the Midwest, listening to Radio
Australia (Boomerang!) and the BBC World Service.

1996 came and I moved down south just a little bit, and I got some great
reception near the Smoky Mountains with my DX-390. I was listening to
the BBC the night Diana was killed and that's how I got the announcement
before CNN did.

I just got an ICF-7600GR and I'm disappointed. Not in the radio itself
which is a fine piece of craftsmanship (for the money) but because all
the stuff I used to listen to is just bloody well GONE. BBC, Radio
Australia, and Deutche Welle no longer broadcast SW to the Americas.
Only that satellite crap. Thank goodness Russia still seems to have
America targeted broadcasts. Hell, even VOA isn't broadcasting
domestically! What gives?

I'll be open and frank. I'm in San Diego. Is there anything to listen
to anymore in English that I can actually get out here? I have the wire
antenna that came with the radio and I live in a first floor apartment
that was built in the 70s or 80s. I can't invest too much more in a new
antenna. Maybe $50 TOPS. And I can't mount anything outside... as I
live in an apartment. Bedroom window faces south and a street. Living
room window faces north and directly across is another 2 story building.
I'm not very far from MCAS Miramar so there's some open sky around here
with low buildings, nothing too tall.

Is this hopeless? I miss relaxing at night, listening to stuff from
around the world.