I got Bill's trawler radio last night. Today I had a chance to hook it up to
my 5 band vertical dipole, and put a more robust set of batteries in it
(last night I had a short wire and a 9V radio battery).

When tuning across it's four bands (2 LW, AM, and tropical band SW) I found
it to be extremely sensitive, and quite selective, even without using the
bandpass filter. It does tend to overload and get a few images on MW, if the
gain is turned wide open (I don't think it uses AGC), but if it's turned to
about 80%, it's very very good. I use as my MW benchmark the AFN-Korea
outlet in Seoul. It's supposed to be 5 KW on 1530 KHz, but it really can't
be heard well much past the toll gate into/out of Seoul, about 15 Km from
the stations tower. If I can hear it here at all, I feel I'm doing good (80
Km S. of Seoul). On the Pioneer car stereo in our tracker, it's way down in
the mud. On this radio it's actually pretty listenable, though of course not
"local" sounding by any stretch of the imagination.

On LW, I received no less than six different beacons, and three Russian
broadcast stations (I wish I understood Russian!!) The beacons, at least,
were easy to differentiate, since they all have different CW ID's. Prior to
using this radio, I had never heard more than one beacon, and only one of
the Russian broadcast stations. And that was using my Grundig Satellit 650,
and/or my Yaesu FT-847, so this is really quite a radio for LW and MW. The
tropical band SW is more problematic. I can hear many Korean language
stations on there. It's difficult to tell which are local origination, and
which are images or harmonics. There are a couple, however, that can be
safely assumed to be coming from outside Korea, and beamed here in Korean
language. This can be so because there is considerable fading of the daytime
signal, which tends to rule out closeby signals and harmonics.

All in all, a great little radio. It's well worth what Bill asked for it,
and handily beats almost all of the regular bunch for AMBCB reception. With
a good speaker plugged into it (there is no internal speaker), it's even
quite good for program listening.


--
Illigitimus non tatum carborundum

*Don't let the *******s wear you down*