Anyone have one of these and do you recommend. It looks like one of the old Lowes to me.They were pretty good.Are the C or CC models worth it?

The Palstar R30 is one heck of a good receiver. If you can live without bells
and whistles, and want a solid radio that can handle big antennas without
overload, this one is for you.

I don't think the collins filters are much better than the Murata.

I love my R30 and have run it with 700 ft of wire for an antenna ... no BCB
overload.

Highly recommended.

jw
k9rzz

This is a great receiver, very sensitive, but had a few problems. I
sold mine a couple of years ago, it worked flawlessly, but the tuning
knob is very cheap, lightweight and wobbled. The clear LCD covering
seemed to be as thin as plastic wrap, so I felt that it might
eventually break, and it does not have a lot of bells and whistles
that similarly priced sets have. But it seemed to pull in a lot of
stations, and the audio was great.


"Lew Rain" wrote in message ...
Anyone have one of these and do you recommend. It looks like one of the
old Lowes to me.They were pretty good.Are the C or CC models worth it?

--

but the tuning
knob is very cheap, lightweight and wobbled.

You know, during the fall and winter months I carry mine in a backpack wrapped
in bubble wrap along with batteries, headphones, wire, an antenna phaser, etc
and find that the R30 is quite rugged. It gets hauled around on my back while I
mountain bike or hike to secluded DX sites, tugged in and out of the pack ...
no problem. I run it off some old rechargable cell phone batteries.

I thought about adding more weight to the tuning knob (solder or lead), but
then that's just more mass to haul on my back.

I'll be getting the Palstar MW??? preselector soon (second hand) and will
report on it's performance with the R30.

Best DX so far is WDHP, 1620khz US Virgin Islands while using a 700 ft wire on
the ground. Sigs were S9 well over the usual US jumble, and I had no overload
problems from a local station on 1290khz that was a mere 3 miles away.

Gee, am starting to get pumped for the fall DX season!


John K9RZZ

Despite my love of buttons, knobs and switches, this is the radio I
most enjoy using(versus Drake SPR-4 and SW-2, JRC NRD-525, and Lowe
HF-150). Is it the warm yellowish glow of the analog S-meter and
digital frequency display? Maybe a little. But its primary virtue is
the clear, intelligible audio it sends to an external speaker. And it's
that recoverable audio that this is all about, isn't it? I've read this
quality is in large measure a by-product of the exceptionally low phase
noise produced by Paul's (owner of Palstar) circuit design.

Would it be nice to have IF shift, IF notch filtering, synchronous
detection, . . . . .? Sure, but at what cost? But if Palstar releases a
'super R-30' someone's gonna hafta hide my credit card.

I can't compare the filters, as I have only the one R-30 (with 2
Collins.) I'd suggest you call them and have Paul or an assistant
advise you what best fits your needs. I know there are times he's
suggested the lower cost ceramics over the Collins. The Muratas he used
were two of that company's best models, but are no longer being made.
Paul was designing his own as replacements for when his stock finally
runs out.

Ken.



On 2004-09-07 03:10:29 -0400, "Lew Rain" said:

Anyone have one of these and do you recommend. It looks like one of the =
old Lowes to me.They were pretty good.Are the C or CC models worth it?

Anyone have one of these and do you recommend. It looks like one of the
old Lowes to me.They were pretty good.Are the C or CC models worth it?

Beats me. I have the R30CC and haven't tried the bare R30. The Collins
filters are very sharp, to the point where there are varying degrees of a
"whoosh" sound like on a good CW filter. However, the AM-mode Collins filter
is supposed to be narrower than the AM-mode Murata filter to begin with--that
is, at -6dB as opposed to -60dB--and I'll say that the AM-mode Collins filter
is very good at keeping adjacent stations at bay. I find myself tuning +/- 600
Hz to improve the fidelity of a station, which in the end beats not having that
wiggle room.

The sad thing is that you have to get both Collins filters in order to get the
AM-mode filter. The SSB filters are said to be a lot alike in performance. I
simply concluded that I had enough radios with broad filters, and it was time
for a change. I didn't expect the filters to be this tight, and it took some
time to get fully used to it.

Otherwise, I agree with most of what the other posters have stated. A
departure from one post, though: You can get the R30 to overload with a good
enough ground and a short enough antenna plugged into the high-impedance jack.
That said, the longwire that I used on vacation was something like 330 feet
long, and I had no overload problems and excellent mediumwave AM reception.
[Shortwave was great, too, but it was my luck that President Reagan died on the
first day of my vacation, so I felt the need to do daytime AM DX.] In an area
where my Sony ICF-SW7600GR--not a bad AM receiver by any means--could hear only
four or five AM stations without a Select-a-Tenna and maybe 70 stations with
it, the band was pretty much full on the Palstar.

If there was anything that surprised me about the radio, it was the SP30
speaker that I bought with it, well worth the sixty bucks or so. If I had to
do it over again and had to choose between tighter filters and having that
speaker, I'm not sure what I would do.

Michael (in central Florida)

= = = "Lew Rain" wrote in message
= = = ...

Anyone have one of these and do you recommend. It looks like one of the
old Lowes to me.They were pretty good.Are the C or CC models worth it?

--

LR,

Check-out the Palstar R30 eGroup on YAHOO !

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/palstar/

~ RHF
..