A very, very long time ago, not long after I was demobbed, I dabbled with a type of civilian RT commonly known as CB Radio. I wasn’t interested in all the ‘ten four, eyeball eyeball, one four for a copy, what’s your twenty’ malarkey. I was into SSB DXing. I had a modified Cobra 148 GTL DX which gave me the standard 40 American channels, plus a low-block, a low-low block, a high block, and a high-high block. That’s 240 channels.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I blame my time in uniform for getting in to that pastime, obviously. The four things I used to do a lot of (sitting in the back of a lorry in the actual shadow of the Iron Curtain listening to stuff, 1,200 baud telegraphy, HF voice comms over extended distances, and dodgy RTTY) have a lot to answer for.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Anyway, plugged into the back of the aforementioned Cobra was a rather splendid erection (easy tiger), a full-wave dipole mounted very high, and some top notch coax. I also had a quiet place to sit (with or without headphones). I’d establish comms and eventually QSY with folks across Europe, and sometimes the US, depending on skip. That’s not the name of a bush kangaroo, FYI.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Anyway, where I’m going with this is that while I’m writing, I like having a bit of background noise. About half of the time I’ll listen to GHR (but Popmaster is very distracting). The rest of the time I put my scanner on and listen to a bank of Mil and civil air frequencies I’ve programmed in. I can’t explain the need for background noise, other than saying the place is too quiet without something going on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So yes, I am productive while I’m listening to stuff whilst I’m writing. The airband(s) aren’t quiet. I get the Americans on their way to scare half a dozen Welsh sheep, I get air to air refuelling, I get Typhoons out of Coningsby on their way to beat up Hull and the rest of the Humber. I do get the high altitude corridors, obviously, but unfortunately I’m too far adrift for transatlantic, though the good transatlantic comms is HF anyway, not VHF. And now we’re approaching the point.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
My scanner can get all the funky frequencies, but it doesn’t have SSB. So I could, for example, tune down to 19688Khz which is where the Baltic Fleet out of Murmansk are currently pretending they’re a bunch of ocean-going trawlers, but I’d have to listen to an SSB transmission on full. And that’s not good.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So my first idea was to supplement my trusty Trident TR1200 scanner<\/a> (500KHz to 1.3Ghz) with a proper HF device, something SSB-capable with full BFO. And then I thought I would get easily distracted because what I really needed isn’t an HF receiver, what I really needed is an HF scanner – and now we’ve opened a different tin of worms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n