This is an excellent data base of LW and MW worldwide: www.mwlist.org
WGY 810 KHz, Schenectady, NY
According to the website:
This is a radio station database of all Longwave (LW), Medium wave (MW) and Tropical bands stations worldwide. You can browse frequency and location lists, search for stations, and get technical information. If you register, you can use a online logbook, create bandscans, and provide update information to the database editors. This is a free, open and non-commercial hobby project which depends on the cooperation of many individuals.
For LW/MW DXer’s this is a good information source.
File under: You can find the darnest things at the transmitter site. Near as I can tell, this computer dates from about 1985 or so, it looks remarkably like my Apple IIe of the same vintage. We used an earlier model TRS-80 in high school, that model had a cassette deck as the data storage device. These have 5 1/4 inch floppy disks. I used my Apple IIe as a gloried type writer, mostly for college papers. I did manage to write some basic programs, no doubt copied from somewhere else.
For the day though, saving something for later editing, even to a floppy drive, was an order of magnitude over the single spaced type written page.
Tandy TRS-80 Model 4D computer
There are actually two of these computers, serial numbers 7086 and 7128. I have no idea whether they work. I’d donate them to a museum if there were one that was interested. Otherwise, they may sit in the corner for another twenty years or so.
Satellite dishes have been a part of radio station technical equipment for years. I am surprised at the number of broadcast engineers that do not consider center of box when aiming dishes. As dishes get larger and focal points get smaller, center of box aiming is not a nice thing to do, it is a necessary thing to do. The latest generation of satellite receivers, (AKA XDS) have a somewhat less than lively RF front end, they require higher E/B than the previous generation Starguide receivers to stay locked.
For years, the majority of commercial radio networks were carried on AMC-8 or its predecessors living at 139° W. On the East Coast, particularly in the Northeast, that makes aiming points relatively low to the horizon, anywhere between 8-10° elevation.
3.2 meter COMTECH satellite dish
This all means that precise aiming the satellite receive dish is critical for satisfactory performance. SES Americom owns AMC-8 and thus they have a web page about all of their satellites and important operating information. SES Center of box for AMC-8 is available in one-month blocks, which makes scheduling the aiming chore fairly easy.
Large satellite dish aiming diagram
I have always used a spectrum analyzer through a 3 dB splitter to look at the 950 MHz LNB output. This aiming setup allows the best combination of Azimuth/Elevation/polarization. Using the satellite receiver to confirm and maintain signal lock, peak the waveform that the receiver is locked to. It is pretty crowded up there, so there will be lots of signals on the spectrum analyzer trace.
It is a pain in the rear end to lug all that equipment out to the satellite dish, especially if it is on the roof. That is why it only need be done once; the right way the first time.
Any shortcuts will likely lead to those annoying chirps and dropouts or complete loss programming, particularly when the weather turns bad.
Audacity is the name of a free digital audio editing software package distributed by Sourceforge. It is distributed under Version 2 of GPL without exceptions. It does require a .mp3 plug-in to generate mp3 files. According to the Sourceforge website:
Audacity was started by Dominic Mazzoni and Roger Dannenberg in the fall of 1999 at Carnegie Mellon University. It was released as open-source software at SourceForge.net in May of 2000…
Audacity is a free, easy-to-use and multilingual audio editor and recorder for Windows, Mac OS X, GNU/Linux and other operating systems. You can use Audacity to:
Record live audio.
Convert tapes and records into digital recordings or CDs.
So, I have downloaded a copy and installed it on my test machine in the basement (hardware requirements here). My test machine is a stripped-out P4 2.4 GHz Windows XP box that I can isolate from the network and experiment with. On that machine with a digigram VX-880 soundcard, Audacity did very well. I did not record multi-track, but with 24-bit sound sampled at 48 KHz, the computer kept up nicely. The basic editing features are intuitive and easy to manipulate with a mouse and keypad.
For a quick-to-install downloadable program, it does very well. Does it do everything like Adobe Audition or other professional editing software suite does? No. But for the price, it can’t be beat.
