Monday, October 25, 2021

RDMW 2022 Mediumwave Pattern Reference

North American Broadcast Mapping Tool & Database

Editor's note: The newest version of the pattern set (2024) is available. See the link at the upper right of this page.

We are proud to announce the launch of the latest edition RDMW-2022 Medium Wave Pattern Reference. Now in its 9th year, RDMW comes with many new features and updated station data ready for 2022.

Radio Data Medium Wave (RDMW) allows you to see and map the coverage area of all medium wave (AM/MW) broadcast stations in North America.

Included is a complete set of Google Map-based, HTML-driven maps which show the most current pattern plots of all licensed US and Canadian mediumwave broadcast stations from 530 - 1700 KHz. Through careful curating, virtually 99% of all licensed Mexican stations are also included, the vast majority with plots. Lastly, also included are a sample of Caribbean stations, and the coastal marine NAVTEX 490 Khz and 518 KHz stations.

The set includes all frequencies for the indicated services: Unlimited, Daytime, Nighttime, and Critical Hours. Data for the plots is based on the current FCC and Industry Canada databases available at creation (October 19, 2021).

870 KHz - skywave at night to the UK

If you've ever wondered why a radio listener would be interested in the coverage patterns or maps of radio stations then you can find out at Medium Wave Circle.

New developments for 2022 include:

  • The latest callsign and technical data for all US and Canadian MW stations
  • Expansion to cover Mexico, Bahamas and the Caribbean for the first time
  • Expansion to cover 490kHz – 1700kHz; now includes MW Navtex stations
  • Addition of real-time night/day terminator (greyline)
  • “Click+Save” setting of your receiver location
  • Easy tuning control added to control bar
  • Easy daypart selector added to control bar
  • Ray tracing control added on a per station basis.
  • In-screen “Help” button

Knowledge drawn from RDMW has been fundamental in helping DXers further their craft and enjoy their hobby. It can help you plan your listening and help you target stations broadcasting from particular areas. Intelligence displayed by RDMW has helped U.S. & European DXers plan and hear US stations over great distances – including so-called “daytimer DX” and transpolar propagation. The RDMW maps will also help you determine which stations you might hear on a particular channel, and which might be rather more elusive.

Drawing on the latest data from official sources, club sources and topped off with many days of extensive data checking and validation RDMW probably has the most comprehensive and up to date dataset for AM/MW broadcasting stations in North America. This data is combined with complex geophysical data and propagation modelling to provide you with extremely detailed coverage maps for both daytime groundwave and nighttime skywave coverage for around 5000 radio stations.

RDMW 2022 has been developed and tested by Bill Scott and Steve Whitt and is exclusively available from the Medium Wave Circle DXing club.

This year marks a sea change in how the map sets will be delivered to you, the end user. Europe's premier medium wave DX club, The Medium Wave Circle will be hosting the download. The Medium Wave Circle is an international club for radio enthusiasts. It brings together people all over the world with a similar interest in medium wave radio (MW, AM or BCB) and related topics.

A small fee will be charged to cover bandwidth costs, less than a price of a coffee. Paid membership in the club is not required. Payment is through a PayPal gateway and is safe and secure. You do not need a PayPal account to use this facility.

Click the link just below and get your copy today.

RDMW 2022 Medium Wave Pattern Reference – Medium Wave Circle (mwcircle.org)

Consider supporting The Medium Wave Circle by joining. Its membership fee is a modest amount for a great return. You will also get access to the group's monthly newsletter, The Medium Wave News, published since 1954, and over 500 past copies of MWN available exclusively to members. You will also get access to the Circle archives and pre-publication discounts on the essential reference book the World Radio TV Handbook. Last but not least, you will have access to a great forum of friendly and helpful people on groups.io.

We hope you will enjoy this latest version of the Radio Data Medium Wave Pattern Reference. Several hundred hours have been spent this year enhancing the pattern generating program and curating the data. Best of DX!


Tuesday, October 5, 2021

Magnetic Longwire Balun : The Original by RF Systems

 An oldie but a goodie. Remember this?

Magnetic Longwire Balun

Years ago (almost 40) when I was quite active in my ham career and shortwave DXing I purchased one of these for about $40. An expensive little device. But I was curious about the claims.

It was advertised as a magnetic balun, low noise, matching almost anything below 40 MHz. Receive only of course. You can search on "RF Systems Magnetic Balun" and find many sites, blogs and forums where the merits of this device have been discussed.

The RF Systems Magnetic Balun is basically an 18:1 impedance matching transformer. "Balun" means balanced-to-unbalanced transformation - a transformer device which takes a balanced impedance (like the center feed point off a dipole) and transforms it to an unbalanced impedance (like coaxial cable). The RF Systems Magnetic Balun is really not a balun but what is known as an Un-un. In this case, an 18:1 impedance transformer, transforming an unbalanced input to an unbalanced output. One such example might be to match the unbalanced end-fed longwire to a 50 ohm coaxial cable, which is also unbalanced.

In more recent times, I've had very good luck with mine using it with both a "longwire" and a 25 ft., ground-mounted, but ungrounded vertical. Longwire in this case, means anything of 25 to 100 ft. in length, which is not really long in the traditional sense.

In personal experience over the years, the low noise claim gave minimal results. Low noise might be gained by positioning your longwire a ways away from any noise source and feeding the receiver with a long run of coax. But that's just common sense. Grounding the coax's shield at the entry point to the house can help too.

Presented at the bottom of this post are good quality .JPG images of the original document which came with the RF Systems Magnetic Balun.


jbe.nl catalog item for the RF Systems Magnetic Balun


Other Matching Options

Good or even better results can sometimes be had with other matching devices like an antenna tuner which will also do the matching like a balun would. MFJ Enterprises has quite a few which can be used for simply tuning odd lengths of wire. Google will produce many results for antenna tuners. They can be made pretty simply with a variable capacitor and some hand wound coils.

For AM broadcast DXing I prefer inductive coupling right into the radio's own ferrite antenna. Matching is pretty well taken care of then and good signal transfer is also accomplished, and often without the overloading that can occur when directly connected.

A circuit example of a similar, but 9:1 impedance transformation "magnetic balun" can be found at M0UKD.

This is another "un-un", as it transforms between unbalanced input (the longwire) to unbalanced output (the coax input of the radio). This circuit is actually the same circuit as the RF Systems balun I have. It takes a high impedance (the longwire) and transforms it by a 9:1 ratio down to a lower impedance (usually the radio's input connector). Note that radios with external longwire posts like a CCRadio SW may already be set up for high impedance input. It depends on the input circuitry used in the radio.

Be careful directly connecting wire to any of these DSP radios. Modern chip electronics is not so forgiving as the old tube stuff from my generation. I have fried several radios with static discharge.

Inductive coupling to a radio's ferrite loop can easily be done.

Find an old piece of ferrite bar or rod and close-wind 15-20 turns of insulated wire on it. Ground one end to the earth and connect the other end to the longwire. Then couple the ferrite bar/rod to your radio's ferrite antenna. You can even run it through a length of coaxial cable, though better results will be obtained by using the RF Systems balun or 9:1 balun where the longwire connects to the end of the coax (outside).

My 25 ft. vertical is set up that way. Picture the vertical as a simple end fed longwire (fed at the bottom and insulated from the ground). It is attached there to the RF Systems balun and through the balun to the coaxial cable. The 50 ft. coax cable runs to the inside of the house where the center and shield of the coax is connected to the 15-20 turn winding around that spare piece of ferrite bar/rod.

Sensitivity can then be adjusted by the closeness of the coupling to the radio.

Be aware, most of these radios are easily overloaded by excessive signal. It shouldn't take much of a longwire to do that.

The old-fashioned Pi type tuners work quite well for longwires. This involves two variable capacitors with a coil between them. I used to have a homemade one which I used for years on the ham bands for both transmit and receive. That style can match about anything.

The Grove TUN-4 Antenna Tuner

Grove Electronics, now out of business, (they also published the Monitoring Times magazine years ago) used to sell quite a few receive tuners. I still have the TUN-4 which is quite nice and will tune from below the AM band to 30 MHz. It also has a preamplifier. You can often find these and the others on eBay. The American Radio History web site has many old radio catalogs which you can peruse. Here is an old Grove catalog, dating back to 1989.

Grove Catalog, 1989

The Grove TUN-4 Antenna Tuner

Why impedance matching?

Maximum signal is transferred (and I might add with minimum distortion) if the impedance is matched between input and output of a circuit. To give a simple example, in the old days of Hi-Fi the audio enthusiast always made sure his speakers were matched to the stereo's speaker output. If the stereo had an 8 ohm speaker connection, you made sure you used 8 ohm speakers, not 16 or 32 ohm speakers. Maximum signal would be transferred to an 8 ohm speaker, and also as important, minimum distortion would result.

The same is with radio and antennas. Typical longwire antennas might have an inherent impedance in the neighborhood of 450 ohms, or more. Old radios which had a single antenna post for a longwire usually made sure that the input was designed around 450 ohms. The coax inputs or mini-jack inputs of most receivers are usually designed around an input impedance of about 50 ohms. If we connect a longwire to one of these inputs we are creating a series circuit of 450+50 or 500 ohms at the input with our "tap" at the 50 ohm point above ground. Ohm's law tells us that we are only getting 50/500 or one-tenth the signal available from the longwire. This is remedied by the impedance matching transformer or by the antenna tuner. Properly matched, we get the full signal off the longwire.

In the ham radio world, good matching is even more important when transmitting to an antenna. A poor match results in the antenna reflecting some or most of the power right back at the transmitter. These reflections also exist on receiving antennas when mis-matched.

Some radios seem to be a little more tolerant of antenna mismatch, some not. I have the SDRPlay RSP1a SDR receiver here and I find it not tolerant at all of antenna mis-match. Another, the Yaesu FRG-7, dating back to the late 1970s, is particularly sensitive to proper impedance matching. This is a very sensitive radio, but you must match the antenna to it to get maximum results, and particularly on mediumwave. Many radios, however, will respond favorably by hooking up any sort of wire to them.

For receive purposes, feeding the radio using 75 ohm coax instead of 50 ohm won't matter much. I've used 75 ohm TV cable for years for receiving on the HF bands - 30 MHz and below. Transmitting or VHF/UHF work would be a different story. The 75 ohm to 50 ohm mis-match is a 1.5:1 mis-match, which coincidentally is also a 1.5:1 SWR (Standing Wave Ratio) in the ham radio transmitting world. That's usually about at the edge of acceptability for transmitting in the HF range.

The impedance transformation of 450 to 50 ohms is a 9:1 ratio of course. It is based on the windings ratio and is equivalent to the square of the windings ratio. If the input side (the 450 ohm side) has 3 times the number of turns than the output side (the 50 ohm side), then the turns (windings) ratio is 3. 3 squared = 9, so the impedance transformation is 9:1. The RF Systems balun, at 18:1, presents a turns ration of about 4.25, the square root of 18.

For 75 ohms, you'd need an impedance transformation ratio of 6:1 (450/75). The square root of 6 is approximately 2.5, so you'd need a turns ratio of 2.5 from input to output. 10 turns to 4 turns would do it.

Understand that the 450 ohm figure for the longwire may vary greatly above or below this figure depending on the frequency you are receiving. In other words, the impedance presented at the end of the wire is frequency dependent. The original concept of a longwire was a wire of several wavelengths. Casually, someone throws an odd length of wire out a window and calls it a longwire. If your end-fed "longwire" is anywhere near one-quarter wavelength of the frequency being received, you probably are looking at an impedance of 20-75 ohms, not 450 ohms. An end-fed halfwave length of wire might present itself around 1000-2000 ohms. The point I'm trying to make here is that the 9:1 or 18:1 balun is there just to get you in the ballpark for this higher impedance, matching-wise.

And now, the RF Systems Magnetic Balun. Click on each image for the full resolution.