ELEC 432

Urban Reception of International Broadcasting

Although many of the major international broadcasters (such as the BBC and Deutsche Welle) have stopped directing their shortwave signals to North America, many smaller countries still beam their signals our way. In a quiet RF environment these stations can easilly be received by inexpensive receivers such as the Kaito KA1101 we have in the lab.

But a modern urban environment is anything but quiet in the HF region of the spectrum. A particularly ubiquitous and egregious offender is the switching power supply, with its fast rise time, 100 kHz, high current waveforms spreading radiation well beyond 10 MHz. Various solutions are available, including directional loop antennas and noise cancellers (and here) which combine scaled and phase shifted signals from two antennas to attempt to cancel an interference source. Although these devices can often provide some improvement, they can be tedious to adjust and have limited ability to deal with multiple interference sources.

If listening to a non-domestic take on the world news or honing your foriegn language skills does not appeal to you, there's always WBCQ, rebroadcasting programs from the classic era of American Radio, including Dimension X and The Jean Shepherd Show.