Well, I am slowly but surely making progress with my antenna. I have been having a lot of trouble with RF interference from my random wire antenna. I ran a shielded COAX feed to it, which I grounded, but reception was horrible.
Well, this weekend, I went back up the hill, and made some modifications to try and get a better ground. I also grounded the end of the COAX going into the radio. This second step seemed to make a noticeable improvement to the signal quality (although there is still a lot of interference). I was able to pick up some broadcasts I hadn’t picked up before:
- 11735 kHz 0118 - 0122 UTC (Jan 14, 2007). Voice of Korea. SIO 222. This is the first time I have picked it up this early in the night
- 9675 kHz 0456 - 0505 UTC Radio Exterior de Espana. SIO 433. (via Costa Rica). News in Spanish.
My next step is to try to get a copper bar for the antenna ground (just have a small metal nail right now), as well as use a balum (need to read up on these some more).
