rock95seven

So after having given up on a basket case talking house v5 transmitter almost 12 months ago, I drug it back out and tried something different.

On previous setups with the TH I had it up on 1610 AM but the hum and range was horrible.
I managed to get the hum out of it but never got more than 1/4 mile or less even on 1700 khz.

Yesterday I tried it on 530 khz, still has a slight hum but the audio is better with one draw back. The range is way worse down on 530 khz, no where near the 1/4 mile or whatever it was 12 months ago on the higher frequencies.

Now I didn’t expect stellar results on 530 because well it stands to reason that the wire antenna provided with the transmitter is just too short for a frequency this low in the AM broadcast band.

But that doesn’t mean it isn’t useful, I plugged a Bearcat BC74XLT Scanner into the TH and programmed the scanner for 162.475 Mhz which is N.O.A.A. Weather radio for my area.

So for 130 feet (give or take a few feet) there were at least two houses that could hear it if they even bother to tune around looking for something to hear on AM Radio.

I just might leave it like that or perhaps fire up an old Windows Xp machine with Zararadio and Weather Watcher for a constant looping of the time, temperature,humidity and the call sign WXW 530 Willard,Ky.

Included in this post is two snapshots taken from our security cameras which kind of sort of shows the distance covered by the TH v5. (this is not the modified version btw)

Just messing around out of sheer boardumb erm boredom eh whatever! lol

Image Link

Kind feel like I am making radio with antique technology like this.

I really really do not like microsoft, in fact if i had to say I liked any of their operating systems it would be Windows Xp and lower. I am not a big fan of the new stuff at all BUT…

I ordered a new copy of Windows 7 Home Premium because I had wiped my hard drive of all traces of Windows 7 2 years ago to run Ubuntu 14.04 and higher.
Now I can do a lot of things with both Microsoft and Linux and I am pretty proficiant in both arenas. There isn’t too many things I can”t handle with both operating systems but most variants of Linux are my strongest points, i like code, i like running things from a command line, terminals are my friend.

But recently I tried to run Zararadio using Wine under Ubuntu 15.04 (linux) with no luck and lots of frustration. I finally said ENOUGH ALREADY and Stephanie odered a replacement disk of Windows 7 Home Premium for my stations computer.

I am using an HP Pavilion p6-2108p desktop with 1 TB hard drive, 8 GB Ram, AMD Dual Core E2-3200 processors. It’s a fairly fast pc for an HP product. 

The disk arrived today about 2 days earlier than the expected delivery date, I spent a good part of the evening installing Windows 7 Home Premium and the countless drivers, updates and software I needed to run Blue Bucket Radio smoothly.

Including Zararadio v 1.6.2 . Ahh how I’ve missed you Zara.
It’s like an old friend coming back after a long vacation.

So I am sure there are few more updates to deal with and I have to be sure not to upgrade to Windows 8 or 10. I can deal with Windows 7 weird quirks as long as it will allow me to run Blue Bucket Radio on a daily basis without much trouble.

I still have other computers running Ubuntu and various versions of Linux and probably later on this HP will be dual boot with a variant of Linux , but for now it just works.

Now on to setting up Zara and other necessary softwares .

My wife Stephanie and I spent part of the day in town, the rest of the evening I have been messing around with the SSTran AMT3000.

I ran a new section of ground wire from a ground rod outside and into the house where the transmitter is. This helped the audio considerably, unfortunetly it is still on the indoor antenna so range is about 100 feet.

But what I really wanted to do was post a better sound check and this one by far has better clarity. I chose to set up the EQ and the on-board processor, which i run very lightly.

Here is a short clip of that sound check. I used Pink Floyd – Welcome to the Machine

Tweaked Sound

To me this sounds great. What do you think?

It’s raining in Kentucky.
And why wouldn’t it be? I only wanted to build a coil loaded antenna.

The fall colors sure are nice, but it’s raining.
The air is cool, 59 degrees and it’s raining.

It just occured to me, the next nice day i get here in the mountains I had better take advantage of and just build this antenna or this AM Station is going to be stuck in the studio all winter as an indoor operation. Sigh…. It’s raining.