A late morning with some rather good TADX

Having some late starts has its advantages when it comes to LF DXing. This morning I was not needed in the office until 9am which meant some time having a look around the MW band for some US and Canadian stations. Don’t get me wrong I am up with the birds so if there is DX about at 6am then I am there to catch it! The sprogs do not as yet understand what a laying means …

I normally like to check 1010 KHz and 1050 KHz as both are pretty strong to me on the loop, well I was rewarded well this morning, Perseus was showing very strong carriers on all the 10 KHz channels across the MW band.

CFRB and WWZN were like locals to me. Pretty amazing to think that the 1.1 meter ALA330S loop was working that well! It’s not designed for MW DXing as the gain falls off below 2 MHz but even so – the recordings I’ve made this morning show that even at 8.45am they were still very audible. Much more so that the inverted L that I have up which is swamped by locals the moment the sun rises all trace of TADX more or less vanishes, whereas the loop is still going strong. That is one area that the wideband antenna and the Perseus are made for each other – showing the 2 MHz of the LF end of the spectrum at one time in waterfall mode allows you to spot the TADX a mile off.

With this in mind and what it seems a new aspect to my Perseus listening I have decided that father Christmas is bringing me something better for TADX – the ALA100 – this large aperture loop looks ideal for my QTH and would allow some lower frequencies to be DX’ed a little better. The ALA330S is great for UTEs higher up and to some extent the LF bands and the inverted L works very well all over, but the reviews of the ALA100 make it very tempting. I know what I will be doing on the 25th December this year! With the turkey in the oven cooking away I will be running some more RG58/U down the bottom of the garden to my new toy.

The TADX mp3 recordings are below; they were made at 8.43am and 8.45am. Most remarkable from my modest setup considering it was pretty much daylight by then.

CFRB-WINS1010.mp3 (4.58 mb)

WWZN_AM.mp3 (942.49 kb)

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