bpnjensen wrote:

Same experience here. There are times of day and bands where the RFI
waxes and wanes, and sometimes conditions are right for the really weak
stuff to make it on through anyhow. It is a very unusual day, though,
when the noise level is flat and the weak stuff becomes routine. By
routine I mean not necessarily easy copy, but *there at all*.

Usually, when my S-meter reading is low, it means that conditions on
that band at that time are just poor. Often, conditions can be poor
and the S-meter reading can still be high, and I attribute this to
local garbage mostly. When I lived in rural New England, this latter
condition never exisited...much more common here in the City.

I thought that variation over the course of a day in which bands are
noisy and which aren't was just inescapable and largely a function of
atmospheric noise. Sounds like I should try rural New England! I used
to live in Nevada, outside of Reno, fairly far removed from sources of
RFI, but found things to be not much better there than they are for me
now. Of course, Nevada probably counts as a "weak signal area". That
may have contributed to my sense that things were 'noisy' in NV. And
then there are all those neon signs on the casinos--the RFI from those
probably travels all over the place.


One of these days I'm going to go to battery power for the RX, and I
have a hunch that this switch will help considerably. That, and
getting the local 50kw AM sloppers to clean up their acts (their
harmonics on frequency multiples are just harrowing). If all else
fails, I will move to rural Wyoming/Idaho and solve a whole bunch of
urban-related problems all at once.

Bruce Jensen

Battery power does help. I sometimes run the Drake off a battery.
Another thing that helps with the AM stations is a good high pass
filter. I use the one from Kiwa, even though most of my receivers have
solid front ends.

Steve