Tom Boyd's 2010 Entry

Stations Heard: 13

I’m a fairly new subscriber to this forum and enjoyed doing my first contest. My receiver was the ‘Champion’ 2-tube superhet, built from an article by Bob Dennison W2HBE in the March ‘04 issue of Electric Radio. It uses a 6BE6 converter followed by a 6AZ8 pentode-triode (see the accompanying schematic) and covers 6.1 to 15.1 mHz. The only significant departure I made from Dennison’s design was the addition of a much-needed bandspread capacitor. For more details about the Champion and my other home-brew projects please visit my web page.

The Champion only pulls in strong stations, although its performance would undoubtedly improve if I could put up a better antenna. With a rig like this it isn’t possible to determine the exact frequency of a signal (apart from WWV) unless it happens to be announced on-air. For each station logged, I would note the band I was tuned to and then go to the broadcaster’s website to look up the probable frequency. I included only the stations I could positively identify, even though the Champion pulled in a fair number of Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Russian and other foreign language broadcasts.

Thanks for putting on the contest—I looked at it as a reward for the time spent in building the rig in the first place!

    	#	UTC	Station	Band/Freq.
	
7/31/2010	
   1	14:18	WWV	10000	
   2	14:22	WEWN	22M (13835?)	
   3	14:44	Radio Australia	41M (7240?)	
8/3/2010	
   4	11:26	Radio Australia	31M (9475?)
8/4/2010	
   5	01:57	WHRI	41M (7315?)	
8/5/2010
	6	01:23	China Radio Int’l	31M (9570?)
8/6/2010
	7	21:43	WWV	15000
	8	00:55	WWCR	31M (9980?)
8/7/2010
	9	13:24	Radio New Zealand Int’l	49M (6170?)
8/9/2010
	10	14:52	WEWN	25M (12050?)
	11	00:57	WYFR	31M (9505?)
	12	03:58	China Radio Int’l	49M (6190?)
8/10/2010
	13	23:50	China Radio Int’l	25M (11970?)