Ebay; good or bad source for test equipment?

A cautionary tale.

I have purchased and sold several things through Ebay over the years. Most of the time the transactions go smoothly. The item is more or less as described and it arrives in a reasonable time period.

All good.

Recently, I saw this very nice looking Agilent E5061B Vector Network Analyzer. The price was right and it even came with this nice hard case. This is great, I need something like this for an upcoming project.

The only very small, almost too small to notice possible issue was; its in Canada. With all the trade rhetoric going around, I thought, perhaps I should look to buy something from the US. Nah, its fine, after all, it is not coming from China.

Nope.

The order went in, the seller shipped the package, it arrived in Memphis, TN and the trail goes cold after that:

I have emailed and called FedEx several times. They say, “all good, we have all the documentation we need, it will be shipped out shortly.” Last time I called, I spoke to a woman in the Philippines who’s phone cut out with every other word.

It seems probable that all international shipments are stuck in some giant FedEx terminal waiting for someone to say okay or calculate some tariff. The pessimistic view is that it has been stolen. I have lost things in transit.

I should have listened to my little voice. While the problem is not with Ebay itself, importing equipment from another country is problematic. I would advise anyone bidding on Ebay to pay close attention to the location of the item you are purchasing.

In the mean time, I still need to finish my project…

Measuring Guy Wire tension

I was watching the tower crew measure the guy tensions on this tower the other day:

AM tower

The preferred method is to use a pulling force to move the guy wire slightly off of the turnbuckle or hairpin bolt then measure that force. Hydraulic rams with a pressure gauge are used more often then not.

hydraulic ram, showing 7,000 lbs pulling force

These guy wires are called “Bridge Strand,” the bottom wire is is 7/8 and the top is 1 1/8 inches. Normally, these are tensioned to around 5 – 10% of their breaking strength at 60 degrees F. In this case, it was slightly colder so the tensions are a little bit higher. If it would have been warmer, then they would be a few percentage points lower.

A couple of videos for your viewing enjoyment:

Lower guy tension 7,400 lbs, Upper guy wire tension 10,500 lbs. Both are well within their ranges.

I love work. I can watch people do it all day.

The Pace Accelerates

Update: I decided to to a major edit to this post due to an error in the FCC’s LMS showing more stations as Licensed and Silent than there actually are. Here is a screen shot from the LMS showing most of Audacy’s AM licenses as “Licensed and Silent.”

Regarding the Audacy AM licenses, A little more research shows that they filled for MDCL on April 10th.

WFAN Licensed and Silent, MDCL applied for

Someone at the FCC must have confused “Licensed but coverage area reduced,” with “Licensed and Silent.” It is an easy mistake to make or it is some sort of late April Fools joke. They are now properly listed as “Licensed.”

There are 116 AM stations listed as licensed and silent.

As of this writing, there are 103 full power FM stations and 46 Low Power FM stations in the LMS listed as licensed and silent.

Reading various sources about AM and FM licenses being taken silent around the country. Often, after 12 months, these licenses are quietly surrendered to the FCC. I thought it would be interesting to see exactly how many stations are now deleted.

In the last 12 months the FCC has deleted:

  • 60 full power AM licenses
  • 20 full power FM licenses
  • 53 Low Power FM license
  • 28 FM translators

60 Full power AM licenses deleted in one year is a record.

Sometimes, I get the feeling that licenses that could be sold are instead surrendered because the current owner does not want new competition. Given the shrinking pool of potential advertizers, this makes a little bit of sence. This is a thing we see in American business culture, sort of the “Walmartization” of various business sectors. In other cases, the facility is in such bad shape that it would be cost prohibative to bring it back.

A few people have suggested that once a license is deleted, the allotment can be resurrected and applied for. That is not a bad idea with some caveats for AM class C, D, and FM low power stations. If there is any loosening of broadcast regulation, particularly in AM antenna design, community coverage contours, city of license requirements, and so on, then this could be a way to get more interest in the AM band.

Golos Ameriki

The Voice of America; expended goodwill edition.

Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe were The main sources of Western information behind the Iron Curtain during the Cold War. While the VOA, RFE, and RL used HF, there were also FM relays in the mix. If you wanted to know what the US Government’s position was on any topic, VOA, RFE, and RL were the information sources.

I wrote several articles about this in the past:

So what happened? Why has the current administration shuttered those services?

There are several good reasons why many government broadcasters have reduced or eliminated shortwave:

  • Fewer people care about the US Government’s position
  • Changes in geopolitics
  • Reduced listenership to HF Shortwave Broadcasts due to technical difficulty
  • Large double-sideband AM transmitters are expensive to operate and maintain and therefore are a target for reducing expenses
  • HF transmitter sites require a lot of land and physical infrastructure, which is also expensive to maintain
  • New distribution technology is easier for the end user and less expensive to operate

Many people, particularly young people, do not know the difference between an over-the-air broadcast and an internet stream. Buying a special receiver, putting up some indoor or outdoor antenna, then tuning around several different frequency bands to find something worth listening to, seems like a lot of work. These days, there are few shortwave broadcasts worth listening to, especially in the English language.

The BBC greatly reduced HF distribution of The World Service starting in 2005, favoring more internet-based distribution. Radio Canada International completely went off the air in 2012, scrapping its extensive transmitter site in Sackville NB in 2014. Radio Australia signed off in 2017. Deutsche Welle mostly left the HF band in 2011 while reducing its FM in 2016. The Voice of Russia ended HF broadcasts in 2014.

The only state-owned shortwave broadcaster that has expanded is Radio China International.

VOA Greenville B has some very old transmitters. The newest units date from the late 1980s or early 1990s. The oldest are the two original Continental 420As, dating from 1960, and are original to the building. When I visited there in 2017, two transmitters were on the air, the BBC and the AEG broadcasting at half power to Cuba and Africa respectively. The rest were shut down. The Continentals were difficult to change frequencies on because of the Doherty modulation. The GEs were long in the tooth, but at least serviceable due to the stock of spare parts from site A. I think the overseas sites in the Philippines and Sao Tome are similar.

Many have pointed out, and rightly so, the Internet censorship issue. Terrestrial radio broadcasting is often the best or only way to circumvent the suppression of information. Kim Elliot pointed this out in his Radio World article “Why we need Shortwave 2.0” All of those points are valid.

What can be done? Implementing DRM30 as a worldwide HF broadcasting standard would be a step in the right direction. DRM30 can send ancillary data, including Radiogram type news bulletins. DRM30 is much more energy efficient than DSB AM because there is no carrier, which wastes half or more of the transmitted power on a carrier that contains no information. Instead of a giant transmitter site, with curtain arrays, a more distributed transmission system with several frequencies on the air at the same time uses lower-powered transmitters, simpler antenna systems such as Rotating Log Period Arrays (RLPA), or non-directional vertical towers. This would require some changes to the FCC rules, but now is the time for that.

TV’s ATSC 1 has something called a “Transport Stream ID,” (TSID) which is a unique number assigned to each broadcaster. Wide-band SDRs are capable of scanning across many HF bands. Implementing something similar for DRM30 HF broadcasts would not be that difficult. Shortwave Listeners just program the HF TSID to lock onto the digital broadcast of their choice, if it is available. This would make HF Broadcasting available to most non-technical people looking for information. Most of this can be done with existing technology. However, DRM still (almost 2 decades later) lacks receivers. There is a development on that front as well: RF2Digital support module. The point is that there are many good ways to improve the technology, keep HF broadcasting relevant, and bypass attempts at internet censorship.

What will be done?