Monday 16 July 2012

Yaesu FRG-100 for SWLing

Up until now I have been listening to short wave broadcast stations on my Realistic DX394B. For utility stations this radio is superb for the low, second-hand price tag of around £75, but on AM the audio quality (perhaps due to low cost filters?) was rough, and during QSB it was tough-going on the poor old ears.

I have spent the last few weeks deciding how to upgrade the shack and, to cut a long story short, have had great success with a Yaesu FRG-100 I bought last winter from a G4 friend of mine initially for scanning airforce frequencies on USB from the European air forces.

In fact I now realise this radio was designed with the broadcast band listener in mind: superb audio, sensible choice of AM filters of 6khz and 4khz, and a handy option of being able to set the radio up to toggle through the international broadcast bands and select the steps to, well just about anything really. I have it hooked up to a 1930's Rola bakerlite speaker and the sound quality is quite simply exquisite. I am particularly fussy in this area of sound quality. I have what I suppose you would call a "musical" ear making me perhaps extra sensitive to poor sound quality. But if I tune now to All India Radio in the evening, instead of having to switch off after a few minutes of heavy "whooshing", "crashing" sound with  wildly varying dynamic range during even slight to moderate QSB, I can sit back and enjoy Hindustani classical music and popular light/film music. I have always loved classical Indian music and like nothing better than to listen to it on a humid, wet, summers day (getting a lot of those this year!) and imagine I am thousands of miles away in a tropical sub-continent monsoon.

And whilst the tabla drums on my other SW radios sounded just like any ordinary drum: rather dull and flat, on the FRG100 they sound beautiful: soft, vibrant, full of rich, deep sound. In fact all music is now very, very much more enjoyable. The combination of the better quality radio and the great speaker bring out, as if from nowhere, all these hitherto unheard instruments, and all with rich, tonal sound.

I had considered buying an AOR7030 and even got as far as ordering one last week. But I'm glad I quickly changed my mind in favour of giving my FRG-100 a run for its money as it is a great receiver.

The DX394 is especially good in the sensitivity department and is an excellent radio for weak station DXing in the SW and MW bands. But I have to say for the LW beacons it is sadly totally useless. It was its excellent SW and MW sensitivity that made me worried about changing to a different radio. But the Yaesu 100 seems just as good in this respect as the DX-394 with the added bonus that it is also exremely good for LW beacon DXing.

BTW before I go, I found a great youtube video that showed how, with a few simple button presses, you can extend the coverage of a Realsitic DX394 down to 1khz.

LIMIT
PGM
1
FREQ
ENT

takes you into the strange and fascinating world of time signals, submarine communications and natural radio, all of which I know next to nothing about but am keen to learn. I have already heard MSF59 and DCF77 loud and clear with my DX10 vertical antenna on the washing line!

So I shall be keeping the DX394 in the shack as my main radio for utility listening.

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