Welcome to the wonderful world of (almost) 24/7 reception

Things have been quiet lately, and so has been sometimes the stream. Partially because of heatwave what created one steady mass of 35 deg. centigrade air all the way from here to Moscow. Partially because the antennas on my end, however smart, were too small for the task. So, as a result, the listening post has received a total upgrade in all aspects.

This is what has changed:

- First of all, I have managed to squeeze almst 80 meters worth of antenna wire between houses. Considering that I live in a city center, this was quite a challenge. For antenna enthusiasts, this is currently forming a full wave zig-zag dipole. There is definitely some room for improvement, as only one half is working decenly (although both sides connect to radio with 4:1 balun at the moment).
- The streamer has now its own dedicated machine, running off the UPS, as the rest of networking equipment. While this does not keep it up indefinitely on power outages, it will last a good 15-20 minutes so only major outage or planned works will have an effect.
- Receiver is the same Soft66Lite as previously, the soundcard is, however, my old pro STA dsp24 MKII with ADC/DAC2000 external converter. While this does not make much difference, it allows connecting four radios instead of one, so there will be an opportunity monitoring more stations in future..
- The software setup is pretty much the same, running on Windows XP (earlier setup did run on Win 7 and no problems there, I just did not have a spare Win 7 license for a new machine ..). SDR signal is processed by WinradHD, then broadcasted using edcast standalone to mixstream.net. Everything is hooked together with Virtual Audio Cable.
- The most important change in appearance to outside world is, however, that we have now two streams instead of one. The difference between two are, that one is broadcasting the signal as AM demodulated stream, while the other is processing it as USB demodulated. It is getting way technical for most to explain the difference, but generally it meas that AM stream can be heared about half the day and the rest of the time onlu USB demodulated signal can be heard. This does not contain all of the UVB-76 broadcasted signal, but only about 3/4 of it. It also sometimes changes notably in pitch, if there are some maintenance works in progress at UVB-76 itself. It is, however, a good tool to make a "health checks". Both links are now at the top of the page.

Happy listening!