Hello and welcome to the last PIRATE RADIO REPORT of 1998! I hope all of you had a great Thanksgiving. Now it’s time for Christmas.
If you’ve been tuning the pirate bands over the past few weeks and haven’t heard anything, don’t worry. It’s not bad propagation, a broken radio or antenna that’s the cause.
Permalink | Comments off
This has been one of the most fun-to-use receivers I have ever tested — I think that any SWL with a computer would love to have one of these radios! Since the radio’s control functions and most of the signal processing are done via software, the radio has a fantastic price to performance ratio, with a price of $295 plus shipping. The Ten-Tec RX-320 is a 3 x 6.25 x 6.5 inch black metal box that plugs into a serial port of a personal computer running Windows 3.1 or 95. The computer must be a 386 or better and have at least one megabyte of free hard disk space available. The DSP functions are handled by a chip in the receiver, so processor speed is not important for receiver performance. I used a 200 MHz Pentium and response to commands was almost instantaneous. The receiver is supplied with a 9 pin (DB9) serial cable, AC adapter, a patch cord for connecting the receiver’s audio output to the computer’s sound card line input, control software on a 3.5 inch diskette and a telescoping whip antenna which screws into the radio’s circuit board via a hole in the top cover. Provision for an external antenna (RCA phono connector) and an external 4 ohm speaker (1/8 inch jack) are available on the radio’s rear panel.
Permalink | Comments off