Recommend a few good world wide band receivers with ssb

Bought a old solid state world band radio 6 months back and I have really enjoyed going through the frequencies but a couple of the short wave frequencies bands don't pick up anything. So it's slightly faulty .
But I'm interested now.

I'm looking for recommendations for another more modern radio , with ssb . If I'm honest I'm not looking to spend hundreds .is their any good radios up to 70£ max I think I should consider please.
Wider the frequencey range the better please.
If I do have to spend a little more I could consider it too.
Thanks

These are usually available on Ebay for a reasonable price.....I used one for many years and they're great for SWL. Just attach a long piece of wire and you can listen to most of the world on SSB.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/Eton-Grundig-Satellit-750-Ultimate-AM-FM-Stereo-and-Shortwave-Aircraft/114100915723?hash=item1a90f1ce0b:g:r9EAAOSwqNxeMhTj

A lot of the old commercial shortwave bands are pretty much dead nowadays so your old radio may not be actually faulty....just nothing there to receive

Decent communications receivers were and still are relatively expensive, even older second hand units command quite a price. (Or at least above the budget you mention, "expensive" is a relative term).

The biggest bang for buck receivers are SDR, (software defined radio), usually available as a USB 'dongle' and software, so long as you don't mind being tied to a computer they have a lot to offer. They're cheap, cover a wide range of frequencies, (LW to UHF), and being software controlled have a lot of demodulation options, scanning, frequency input, waterfall display, etc.
I have seen people run these type of units from laptops, tablets and even android phones so a lot more portable than first thought. At sub £20 prices and upwards they're highly affordable for what they can achieve.

For a truly portable, battery operated radio experience most modern receivers are based around DSP, (digital signal processing), technology. For the budget you mention something like the Tecsun PL-600 could be a good buy. This radio has been around for a few years, (more modern and more expensive models are now available), but has a good range of options for short wave listening.

There's too many options to give you firm recommendations of particular radios, it depends on what 'floats your boat'


For me personally, SDR and DSP technology seem to suffer a lot with noise from other electronic/electric devices and can require careful setup, but people are successful with them.

I'm more of a tuning dial, coils inside sort of guy No matter how fiddly they can be there's nothing like listening to radio waves with a good old valve receiver(!) It may be old fashioned but the clarity of reception has to be heard to be believed.
Most will never experience such a thing unfortunately.

Ah b*gger....posted this after Phil's massive long eBay URL. Hope you can still read it

Thanks for the ideas tips and links ,I will go through them slowly in a while.
I'm sure the radio is at fault. On one band it's low signals and distorted audio.
I had this on all bands ehen I attached a long wire to either vhf or sw it goes over sensitive and audio become so as I can't understand it.

The air band has white noise either end of vfo scale but nothing in between. However it will occasionally pick up what o believe is sir traffic maybe.
But theirs no back ground white noise at all.
So that's not right .it's like someone turned up squelch full.

It's a koyo same as grundig model 1770 at present.

Hi folks
Looking for recommendations on budget receivers with good sensitivity that can receive am usb lsb fm and more.
Iv narrowed it down to these as they fit the budget.
XHDATA D-808
TECSUN PL-880
TECSUN PL660

Let me know what you'd recommend

Ok....
In the absence of recommendations here, many hours of research showed me that the XHDATA D-808 offered the best value for money, covered all the bands I was looking for including AIR (Pilots) had an awesome battery that's readily available and has great sensitivity.
Can't wait for it to arrive.
I'm surprised that SWL'ing isn't more popular, this device can be tuned to frequencies that I can transmit on, it might be handy as a tool to check my own equipment.

Hi Andrew,

Just noticed your posting here, it may have helped to get more responses if you'd perhaps made a new posting?

(Plus this posting became difficult to read after the lengthy ebay listing posted earlier. )


Nice one with the XHDATA D-808, by all accounts a great little receiver.  

SWLing is still a popular past time and I've been a 'listener' man and boy, (a flipping long time! ) I don't own the same amount of radios I used to have but I still fire up my old Lowe HF-225 for a sweep around the LW/MW & SW bands on a frequent basis.

If it helps any there's a very good site for SWL subjects I check routinely. Link below :-

https://swling.com/blog/


They also did a review of the radio you have decided on :-

https://swling.com/blog/2021/05/dan-revisits-the-venerable-xhdata-d-808-portable-radio/


Have fun with your SWL activities, I know I do mine still enjoying it after all these years.
(Don't half miss the old stations that used to abound shortwave once upon a time though.)


Still use my old Lowe for equipment checks to this day. Before my Yaesu FT-757 packed up I used the low level RF OUT as a makeshift RF signal generator!


All the best,
Victor

Thanks Victor
It looks like Swling might be a useful resource
73's
Andrew

Was scanning round Helsinki Friday on my way home from work, and came to area what was having road works , tarmac work, and the STOP n GO boards were been operated with open , normal Pmr 446 radios, no code , very open, they sent the last car reg info to the next point, close or open that part of the road for traffic, Pmr used here in Finland and children use them summer time, not a very safe traffic control, the company doing the work is a big outfit, many building work, road repair and so on, at least digi Pmr would be better, Any one else found this?

I've heard some terrible examples of cb being used for professional purposes, the acma (radio regulator) here hasn't made rules on the matter however (from the acma website)"OH&S policies invariably indicate that CB equipment is not suitable for any function where worker safety and/or critical business activity is reliant on the equipment. The risk to any company using this technology is significant."

A miming company that I worked for were conducting a blast using uhf ch18 to convey important safety directions, uhf18 is Australia's caravan convoy ch, some travellers passed by chatting, the blast crew asked for radio silence, fortunatelythey learned their lesson and invented in a digital radio network.
Our roadworks generally use cb uhf to control traffic, whenever im stopped at roadworks I hit scan and have a listen... sometimes when I'm let through I key up and say "thank you"

Nice reply, thanks, I will take a PMR radio out with me and see what I can find, might have a joke with some worker doing something not critical and say Hello, Some shops use it for security watch, ,have a nice day there Hotel Zulu

Well, as far as the bit about suitability in the workplace of radio gear and what's 'safe' goes, it's best to use gear that's suitable professionally speaking - I mean for many site uses, you really don't need more than the equiv of Tier 1 or Tier 2 type systems and there are lots of certified gear options inexpensively got so much so that each employee could literally buy their own set, let the firm cover programming and cost of protective carry cases and necessary robust ancillary stuff.

A good example of a well intended but ultimately flawed use of unsuitable gear through penny pinching was the demolition firm who used Tier 1 consumer grade 446 handsets for most of it's site operatives and a high end commercial Tier 2 set for the coordinator/master chief. Had things been straightforward, no issues, but it was a problematic extended pain operation that resulted in dead batteries on the consumer gear rendering the final clear warning to end up being a Chinese whispers affair.

But as for upgrades from a basic cheap multi band receiver, still for SWL like tune and snoop use, I'd avoid any true ultra wideband HF/MF/LF scanner like the plaque - true scanners are not particularly great (bordering on dire vs a good even consumer non-scanner) and why is in it's intentionally designed DNA electrically speaking.

I'd actually give one of those Chinese Si receiver chip controlled by a dev board firmware reprogrammable multimode VFO tunable Rx sets a shot. They are cheap enough as kits to chance, even pre assembled ready to run self-contained power equipped versions are not more than the cost of a modern consumer grade Rx and more comms gen-con grade than table top 'gran's transistor set' typical multiband radio types.

If for no other reason, the will be a notable difference in selectivity between common consumer cheap Rx's (even good ones) and something which is configured as wide coverage with a more gen-cov Rx feature set. And it's ultimately selectivity and rejection and ability to handle extremes of signal levels over wide propagation variation that separated the dire and unworthy from the excellent and not all excellent ones were costly ones.

A follow up - I got hold of one of the black painted pre-built Si47xx based sets - it has the 4735 radio chip, branded as an ATS-20. It was cheap enough, that by the time you've passed about sorting a decent case, added a rechargeable power source (to make it true portable/pocket) it was cheaper than a kit.

Might still rehouse it, but it's case is OK.

Anyway, as a receiver - well I'm pretty impressed as it goes, definitely punches above it's weight and makes every consumer multi-band domestic grade radio I've experienced look like junk performance wise - and I've used some notably good Grundig and better over the years too.

To get it running really well, just add a Möbius type loop antenna (such as those cheapies on eBay etc that are a balun, two sections of coax and a 'phase inverter' and need no ATU for receive use) and that'll cover you from LW through 30Mhz nicely, so the lack of an inbuilt ferrite rod antenna is a non- issue, but easy enough to incorporate switched in if desired.

It easily captured just about every VOLMET station I could hope to expect, pulled in plenty of time SIG references, lots of commercial and secure TG, resolved ham traffic very well on all applicable bands.

Now admittedly the loop antenna brings it alive, but notably it's pretty selective a receiver if you use the right BW selection and use it on auto AGC where appropriate. The BFO range is remarkable, and has a good level of adjustment tuning rates and in SSB you get a reduced set of BW choices appropriate to most SSB SIG use.

So given you can stuff it in a rucksack pocket, the loop will take up about a CIG packet of space broken down and from an unknown initial charge it had standing on receipt, it ran solid for three days before it caved in at battery low shutdown.

Would it substitute for one of my veteren sets? - in practice it's feasible or highly likely.

Would I use it instead of my pro Plessey or
Marconi gen cov gear? - well it wouldn't supercede those as in Rx terms, but frankly I can't say even the radiophile market gear could touch the Plessey, but the ATS-20 isn't hanging it's head in shame in such rarified company either.

But where it tops them all, even the pro gear, is you can literally reprofile it. Since these Si based kit radios use an ATMEGA based Arduino Nano typically as the interface and controller for the radio chip, reconfiguring the radio how you prefer in band spreads per band etc is as simple as altering the freely downloadable Arduino sketch and modify to suit and reprogramming the onboard MCU with your new custom version.

So you could easily do what I did, made an extra band selection that covered aviation HF on a subset of 5 MHz, and because it's continuous coverage in HF mode by chip design, I added a continuous huge wide tunable single band to the selectable range.

Ten minutes tops to do, perfected a damn good little radio.

Bonus feature - use with a passive mag loop and you'll never need a preamp.

I may dig out an old MW/LW ferrite antenna for completeness, but frankly I suspect there's little point as those are adequately covered by the passive loop already.

So apart from a pocket travel set - I could see these being in a stack, say a 6x6 each connected to a loop, having six different coverage setups and you'd have a pretty decent parallel monitor setup.

Worth a heck of a lot more, for it's performance, than it cost (£45 pre assembled) by a very wide margin.

So I'd definitely add it to a very small list I'd actually recommended - even the more senior ham this end was impressed enough to buy one as well.

Löwe HF-150. had one myself and was more than happy with this small but very good receiving radio.

After the AR88 i had a Lowe SRX30 with the analog dial (no digital display) excellent radio, hooked up to a full size G5RV presented to me when i was 14 years old by none other than.....
Louis Varney G5RV, seriously, he was in the UK giving talks to amateur radio clubs around the UK and came to my club in Colwyn Bay in North Wales (the club members and my Dad clubbed together to buy a cheapo 5RV) and he presented it to me !!!!!

Old memory, but always stayed with me how guys i knew only from going to the club meetings put their hand in their pockets to help a young aspring radio nut !

For what is worth a SDR based radio has got to be the best bang for the buck for gen coverage listening....(until that is i find another SRX-30 on e-bay )

Ady

Just getting to grips again with my AOR AR1000. 

Bought it years ago to listen to Airband, played about with storing frequencies, etc. and then put it away for many years. Retrieved it recently, put in fresh batteries and now trying to restore it to factory settings! Not getting much reception with the stubby "rubber duck" antenna indoors, so might need to hang up a loose wire or some such bodge to get going again.