That was fast.
UPSP tracking said Thursday but the SSTran was already in Knoxville,TN yesterday and I had a feeling it wouldn’t sit there until Thusday morning. Thanks Phil and USPS.
Now it’s just a matter of clearing off my messy desk and opening the box.
No, i won’t be doing one of those unboxing videos you see on Youtube, that’s been done to death. Besides, I think we all know what that looks like anyway.
Advice From One Who Did
Barry, one thing to avoid is tossing all the component parts up in the air and letting them tinkle down on your head out of shear joyous anticipation. This can lead to a long family evening down on the floor with flashlights looking for smaller bits.
This is great. Blue Bucket Radio will be transmitting with a class transmitter.
Really looking forward to the reports.
But a unboxing and Range test
But a unboxing and Range test video would be nice. Doing a range and sound check video is a great way to show off what the transmitter can do.
It Iives! , It Lives!
Spent a few hours on it last night and several more today and it LIVES!!
The SSTRAN LIVES! HAHA ! I am amazed since I was having a hard time reading some of the values on the ceramic capacitors. I also have what is called Essential Tremors which is basically my limbs and head have a tremor or shake just bad enough that I have a bit of trouble being presice with the soldering iron. But if they shakes got in the way I would step back away from building for awhille.
Other than that, it sounds great on the wire antenna inside and outside to the car port.
More later.
I’ll do that for ya
Give me some time and I’ll whip up a video in the next day or so.
Interference Radio
AM 1610 ,Now with even more sky wave than ever before!!
Sky wave is NOT our friend is it? Broadcasting with mW power tends to be a challenge when your frequency of choice is quiet during the day and a disaster after sunset.
Now this is not by any means my first attempt at broadcasting on the medium waves but 1610 was a mess for a few days now. It has always been quiet in the day time and some skip from what i assume is either a station from CUBA or a station in Canada with a strong signal to this mountain.
So strong that I was able to hear that station while tuning up my SSTran to 1610 khz, it was beating against my signal and at some point i could hear the announcer in spanish reading the news. I shut the transmitter off and listened for a few minutes, tuned the radio to 1600 and there was another strong spanish station there.
Now I could have gone to the extended band in search of a queiter frequency but that section of the band is congested up here in the higher elevations so i moved further down the band. After several hours of tuning around , i settled for 1520 AM and that is where I will park Blue Bucket Radio on the AM Band.
Now after about an hour of tuning up the transmitter and tweaking the audio chain , the station is set up temporarily on the supplied wire antenna and sounds ….okay but not fantastic. The FM sounds great on 89.7 FM but using the same processing for fm doesn’t always work for AM and so I am wondering what is everyone doing to seperate the processing for fm and am so that everything sounds great??
I had plans to send the audio content to the SSTran via 89.7 FM but that didn’t work as I found out the hard way this evening. So what to do?
As far as range goes? Close to 1000 feet with the antenna just draped across the curtain in the living room. Not ideal, but I want to tweak around on the transmitter a bit before placing it on a coil and 3 meter antenna.
Here is a short video clip of AM 1520 playing over a Grundig G3.
And an audio clip recorded directly from a Sony Walkman on AM 1520.
Ground Radials a Must
You’ve got to have ground radials to get the farthest range.
Using Stereo Tools audio processing software my sound is excellent on both AM & FM, but there are many ways to set-up audio processing.
For AM the biggest challenge is how you handle the audio frequencys above 5kHz.
I have the NRSC pre-emphasis enabled in the AMT3000 & AMT5000 and this gives a sound more like FM.
You know this for sure, but I’ll say it for readers, the “modulation” control on the transmitter is the limiter that keeps your audio from over modulating.
The AMT transmitters also have compression, and I add just a small tad of compression to the AM signal in addition to what the processing does.
NRSC pre-emphasis, which is FCC authorized for all AM broadcasters, allows a 10 kHz audio bandwidth.
For a long time I used the band-pass setting in Stereo Tool for a top limit of 10 kHz, but of course on FM that isn’t as good as it could be.
Now I cut the audio at 15 kHz, and fortunately the only penalty is a lot of splash around my signal on the dial, and luckily there are no adjacent stations being disrupted.
People will think the splash is an IBOC signal.