Longwave and medium wave Listening on my WebSDR?

Why medium and long waves?

You might ask yourself and also me, why exactly do I want to listen to long and medium wave radios? Well the anwser is simple. Mostly medium wave consists out of russian propaganda, but sometimes a good radio station appears and I am able to record it while playing some sort of decent music. Like Pink Floyd - for example.

But what about long waves?

The anwser to that question is also pretty simple. It is a sort of interesting and unexplored band for me at the time of writing this post. So I just want to build a somehow decent setup and explore it a little better. Now, I am only able to listen to Radio Jedynka, BBC4, ALG3 and some aeroplane navigation beacons. And those things tend to get pretty boring pretty fast. Except radio Jedynka. They sometimes play good music. But I have a feeling there is more to this band than what I can see (or hear) right now.

Planned changes

Let’s first talk about the changes I made. First things first, my antenna is a endfed wire antenna around 5 meters above ground with a length of about 23 meters with an 80m band coil. It can receive some stations (like those whom I just mentions), but that’s it. My plan was to build a beverage antenna, but this is such a low band that it wouldn’t make much sence, specially because beverages are highly directional. And I want to hear station from everywhere. So I decided on the MiniWhip from PA0RDT (my choice was insipired by the Utwente WebSDR). But for now, the endfed is enough.

QRM!!!

What about the noise on the bands? Well, that’s is a good question, and I don’t actually have a straight anwser to how do I minimise it. Because we are dealing with such low frequencies, it can be anything. I was able to track down like 50% of my noise, which was causing Radio Jedynka to be so weak, that you could only see a faint carrier wave. And what was the QRM generator that pulled this off? Well, it was my antenna switch power supply. So after I replaced it with a linear power supply, the noise went significantly down.