Reflections about a remote shortwave listeners station

The mediumwave band from 500 to 2000 kHz in the early afternoon. The formerly low-interference remote location is developing into a HF-picket fence. It looks bad, the disturbances can often be excluded by sidebands. If the signals attract, so after dark, you do not get too much of it. Only the SE leg of the K9AY hides the interference very strong. A disturber shuts off punctually at 17z.

This section displays the status of my logged USA & Canada states. It will be updated.







List of abbreviations for states

Pin board at Google Maps

Status 23 March 2018

Heard states/green (USA): 25
Confirmed states/red: 0
Latest heard or confirmed: 1440 WGVL South Carolina

Heard states/green (Canada): 5
Confirmed states/red: 1
Latest heard or confirmed:

Map source: Free Software Foundation. The source has been changed.

After long experimental sessions with the tablet I discovered more good reasons to use the tablet in my remote station. The background why I did long tests is the circumstance I can only use 12 V solar power and need a low Ah consumption gear.

As I mentioned the other day listening and recording with the ELAD FDM-SW2 software was only possible with a limited bandwidht set to ~192 kc/346 kc, which is beyond my needs. The ELAD FDM-SW2 software consumes more resources than the tablet could provide. Recordings stuttered. Now I was testing the Studio 1 software and was able to record and listen stutterfree with ~1500 kc bandwidht. This is enough to record the whole MW Band e.g.

So my complaints are now going to the software developers. Studio 1 is fine, lets say very fine, but not able to record automatically at a certain time, ELAD FDM-SW2 does but is not able to record ~1500 kc bandwidht.

Another issue with the tablet is that it connects only through USB2 (and not USB 3) with the ext. HD. At some times the audio hangs for 1-3 sec. which does not affect the recording in most of the cases, but in some. The tablet can use a 128 GB microSDXC-Card which could be much more faster. I did not test this now because I need more than 128 GB of space.

As I wrote the other day recordings and listening through the HD are possible if connected through a USB-Y-Cable to a seperate batterie charger. The Trekstor Surftab is not so bad as thought here. It is suitable to run the station.

After testing and testing the Trekstor under different problematic situations, I came to the conclusion that this tablet is not suitable to run durable as a remote station. The other day I wrote about problems with the HDD. They are solved. The irregularity was a somehow wrong USB-Y-Cable. After attaching another one the HDD runs smooth. The other issue is the small bandwidth. The tablet resp. the ELAD Software stutters if the bandwidth is not set to 153,6 kHz. That's too less for longtime operations and recordings. I have no idea if this issue can be solved. The tablet comes with 1GB RAM, has a 1.33 MHz processor and there is only 1,3 MB free space left on a disc that comes with 16 GB. Much of it is covered by the operating system. I don't run a lot of additional software. As I wrote in a futher article about 1228,8 kHz bandwidth I cannot confirm this anymore, the devil knows why I came to this result. Only 153,6 kHz bandwidth is left now! The issue might come from the power supply with the SAVAKE USB-cable. If no charging is running in the background the bandwidth could be set to 614.4 kHz. But recordings may be disturbed by lite stutters, as you can hear during listening. If you switch the SAVAKE cable to charging it is possible to record with 614,4 kHz bandwidh for a while until stuttering begins again. The same with 307,2 kHz. If the ELAD FDM-S2 is connected directly as a single device with a single cable to the only USB port 614,4 kHz is possible. And yes 1228,8 kHz sometimes too. It's irregulare.