From Peter, G3JFS in Plymouth.
Locator IO70WJ.
Hi all,
last night (Friday) I made my first primitive attempt at receiving on 500
KHz. With an untuned/unmatched random wire fed via about 50 ft of coax and
an FT1000MP Mk-V I had excellent copy of GI4DPE from about 2300 to 2315
when I shut up shop for the night. S meter readings were meaningless but the
signal painted a very clear trace on the spectran waterfall with occasional
qsb into noise.
There are problems to solve as I live less than a mile away from the local
MW broadcast transmitting station. I don't know how much power is
radiated, or how many transmitters are fed into the aerial but I know it puts
out quite a few spurious signals and intermodulation products as well as
overloading my receiver front end to generate more - I once measured 19
volts dc output from the detector of a crystal set (with a high
impedance meter) connected to a 120 ft long end fed wire.
Like comments I've seen on other rigs my FT1000MP has a big
drop in gain when tuning above 500 KHz. The sensitivity is a bit on the
low side but I am sure that a tuned aerial and low gain preselector will allow
me to use the rig for more serious reception.
Encouraged by my receiving test I have applied for an NOV and hope to join
you the band before too long.
73, Peter
