Progress!

Thanks go to Telamon for posting a timely message. I grabbed my radio
and went out into the park. Not hard to do, as I live essentially in
one. I walked between 50 and 100 yards into the middle of the park,
sat down on a bench and fired up the radio. I tooled around the 49m
band as Telamon suggested and I'm pleased to report that the results
were extremely encouraging. Not sure why I wasn't having better
results the other night when I was miles away from nowhere...

I've recorded the success below, with a small "key" to indicate exactly
what I mean by my terms.

Telamon, you mention the static hiss which you say should go away when
I tune into a sw station. The hiss and static has never in any of my
tests, including this one, gone away. I'm not sure if this is normal
or not, but as some people actually listen to music via sw, I'd have to
say that either it should if the signal is strong enough else those
users have a strong tolerance of poor quality music signals. When
people talk about strong, clear signals and reception, are they in fact
indicating that there is no static?

Okay, here it goes. This was 6:16 to 6:46pm local time (EST), so not
"too" long after sunset.

**********************

TIME: 23:16 to 23:46 UTC

CLEAR = strong voices, no distortion or interference (always some
static)
OKAY = decent, intelligible voices with significant static
BORDERLINE = heavy static, able to ocassionally hear clear voices but
majority is not clear enough to be understood.
NOTHING = complete unintelligible static

FREQ OUTSIDE INSIDE
5950 clear okay
5960 okay nothing
5975 okay borderline to nothing
5990 borderline borderline to nothing
6000 clear okay to borderline
6030 okay to borderline nothing
6055 okay borderline to nothing
6075 borderline nothing
6090 okay to borderline borderline to nothing
6165 clear borderline to nothing

Outside I was using nothing but the whip antenna. Inside, I have a
reel antenna.

I have yet to look up the frequencies to see what I caught. There were
also several frequencies that the auto tuner decided to stop on, though
there was nothing to be heard. I did not record these here.

-P