rock95seven

Blogging my experiments here,

Kind of cool if you ask me. Ive been here with part.us now for a little over a year and have enjoyed every bit of it.
Ive learned alot .

Blogging my experiments here,

Kind of cool if you ask me. Ive been here with part.us now for a little over a year and have enjoyed every bit of it.
Ive learned alot .
I have a place to share my findings on part 15 as i experiement with this fun hobby.

Now i know i have been touching on alot of different subjects here, usually with questions ive had about my project and im all over the board most the time. lol

Today is no different.
Out of boredom and curiosity, i loaded up the sstran into the shielded side of the cable that feeds fm to the 5 foot aluminum flag pole on the front porch.

I dont have the ground connected to anything for the fm so it was free to use. After tuning the sstran i was amazed to find that the signal was clear, strong and appears to have some range to it. (not sure how much range since i havent really checked).

The coax is Perfect Vision RG-6 that i found attached to the home but no longer in use. The bulk of the cable is inside of the home and roughly 8 feet of it runs outside the home to the flag pole on our porch.
So theres 8 ft of cable radiating signal on 1500 am.
Ill give you all a distance report later when i go out, but on a portable crank-up am/fm radio i can hear it loud and clear at 50′ feet from the house.

More Later…

I was reading the forums here yesterday, I read the one John of WDCX posted about the height suggestions for part 15 am when it hit me, vandalism is the main reason my fm antenna is disguised as old glory and why i have hesitated to place my sstran outside.

But wait, what if i installed the sstran and a mp3 player connected to a 12 volt car battery/solar panel and placed a steel whip on the side of my mini-van???

I could feed audio from a playlist on the mp3 player while im out driving around town, then when i park it at home i could simulcast my fm from a cheap battery operated radio.

All of this except the car battery (completly seperate from the vehicle battery) could be stored in a tool box .
The only drawback i see from a setup like this is the cable feeding the signal to the steel whip.

What do you think?? Any suggestions??

That is the question…

Would it work to my advantage to apply compression to sound tracks like music, talk and podcasts before adding them to the library for later use on the radio?

That is the question…

Would it work to my advantage to apply compression to sound tracks like music, talk and podcasts before adding them to the library for later use on the radio?

Remember i am broadcasting on both am and fm without much processing, i use very little processing on the low cpu version of stereo tool.

I want to normalize then add the compression to mp3’s.

Well it seems most of the RFI we had here is gone.

Well it seems most of the RFI we had here is gone.

We had a second internet connection added about a week and half ago, i informed the technician that our landlord wanted the cable installed under the trailor.
That being said, he (the tech) replaced all of the cables and installed them under the home.
I had not checked for the RFI in the home until just last night. Wich leaves me wondering if my neighbors are so lucky? As for the noise outside the home and around the park, i cant figure that one out, most of the utilities around the park are underground until the come up the meters.

Whoohoo! We are transmitting beyond the confines of our tin can! 🙂
I figured out the trouble with the range of my sstran.

Whoohoo! We are transmitting beyond the confines of our tin can! 🙂
I figured out the trouble with the range of my sstran.
Using the walwart that comes with the kit and having used up most of the outlets on this side of the room, i had resorted to plugging the walwart into a 8 foot extension cord.
I feel it has caused some sort of unbalanced match between the antenna and ground. After re-arranging all my cords i was able to plug my sstran into a wall outlet bypassing the ext. cord and any power strips.

I retuned the sstran and was able to hear my station on 1700 am up to 20 feet from the house, after 20 feet i lose the station in all the strange noise we get here in the park.
I say strange because most of the power lines, cable tv and landlines are underground. But the noise is everywhere inside and out. I figure it is caused by the broadband cable internet, but that is just a guess.

So a small victory for 1700 FRL.

I wonder how bad that interference will be for listeners when i build the outdoor antenna?
I suspect my neighbors have the same amount of noise i do. I can only receive about three radio stations in the house, the rest of the bands am or fm is nothing but a loud ringing noise that blocks any signals from the outside world. Sometime ill record the noise on mp3 and post it for your analysis.

Metal is my enemy.:)

I knew it would be hard to get a strong signal outside of the mobile home here, but i had no idea the signal would be so weak just a few feet outside my house.

Metal is my enemy.:)

I knew it would be hard to get a strong signal outside of the mobile home here, but i had no idea the signal would be so weak just a few feet outside my house.

My parking space is so tight here that the nose of my minivan touches the underskirting on my home.
But yet the signal sounds like it would would measure s2 on a decent multiband receiver.

Why so weak? Is the aluminum and wiring etc in the house that good at blocking the signal? It is loud and strong inside, in fact i had to move my boombox away from the sstran to reduce receiver overload.

setup is:
the antenna is hung on the wall
the ground is connected to the cable tv splitter
and the jumpers are removed

am i expecting too much in a tin can?