As I've mentioned here before, I have a Tecsun PL-398MP, an AM/FM/SW/LW mini-boombox radio that works quite well. I wrote an article on it a couple months ago, where I went into the qualities of the radio fairly extensively.
In that article I said the the PL-398 has Longwave (the next band down below the Medium Wave radio band) and, in that article, I describe how to enable the Longwave capability (the default setting is that LW is switched off, for some reason).
After you enable the Longwave capability, the Longwave band will appear if you hit the 'AM' button twice (or a second time, if you have the radio already switched to the AM/MW band).
If you live in Europe especially, Longwave is pretty cool to have, being that there are a few national broadcasters there who still use Longwave as an additional way for listeners to get their programming, as Longwave can easily cover an entire country from just one station. Norway and Iceland had Longwave stations for their mariners and fishermen for the same reason. I think both of those countries have taken their LW stations off the air, though.
There never have been any Longwave broadcast stations here in the US and Canada, but here, the LW band has been used for decades for Aeronautical (and some Marine) Navigation Beacons. And those Marine and Aeronautical beacons are fast disappearing. Just 8 or 9 years ago I was able to DX a bunch of Longwave beacons on my Realistic DX-398, including a few remaining ones in the Puget Sound region, as well as more distant beacons from as far north as British Columbia's Queen Charlotte Islands.
Hearing the Queen Charlotte station was a really cool catch, because the Queen Charlottes (known by the tribes as Haida Gwaai) are a remote archipelago just south of Alaska, and they are about 800 miles (1100 km?) north of me, off the northern British Columbia coast.
Aeronautical beacons are a primitive, but effective navigation aid tool for both mariners and pilots. In the early to mid 20th Century, they were vital, as Longwave is fairly stable via ground wave propagation, and fairly easy to use for navigation. Boats or planes would use a finely tuned Direction Finding Receiver (basically, a Longwave / MW receiver with a large, rotatable, built in loop antenna) to zero in on the direction of the beacon, which would either help them triangulate their position, or help them home in on the beacon to get to the airport or harbor where the beacon would be located.
These navigational beacons always identified with simple, two or three letter Morse Code identifiers. My city, Renton, used to have a beacon at the Renton Airport that was called "RNT". They took that one off the air about 10 years ago. Beacons up in Canada survived a lot longer than the ones in the US, because the more remote locations needed redundancy in airport radio-location aids. However, Canada is taking more and more of their LW beacons off the air.
The last time I checked the LW band with either of my radios, about a year or so ago, I got nothing but hiss and static. I also noticed this when I tried the LW band on the PL-398 after getting it in December 2022, and double checked it with my trusty DX-398. It seemed that every LW beacon in the Puget Sound region (there used to be maybe 5-6 of them) was gone, and the British Columbia beacons I used to hear frequently were gone too.
It looked like -- for all intents and purposes -- Longwave in my section of North America was completely dead.
Well, scratch that!
There still are a few beacons out there to hunt down. Maybe what was jinxing my two radios a year ago, and 4-5 months ago, was crappy ionospheric conditions, because just last night I heard two Longwave beacons -- both of them from a few hundred miles away!
HEARING THE B.C. INTERIOR, AND REMOTE NORTHERN CALIFORNIA
I was tuning the MW band on my PL-398, still trying to figure out the most efficient way to use a loop with it. It's an ongoing process -- the PL-398's AGC is tight enough you really have to listen to the programming get louder, because the volume itself doesn't increase when you peak the loop -- reducing the radio's bandwidth to 1 kHz, peaking the loop, and then widening the bandwidth to taste seems to work best. I've also found that the internal loopstick is pretty efficient and directional on its own, so I've been experimenting with that, too.
Anyway, while DX'ing the MW band I noticed the "LW" being included in the Radio's badgeline at the top of the dial. Longwave.... I hadn't tried it in a while. What could it hurt to tune the band again?
I recalled how to switch the radio to Longwave, as I had enabled the band shortly after first getting the radio. As the AM band was already on and playing, I hit the 'AM' button, and voila! I was hearing hiss and static on Longwave. I figured, "What the heck. There's nothing on the band anymore, but why not check anyway?"
Being the intrepid DXer that I am, I actually tuned the LW band from bottom to top. All I had was the internal loopstick in the radio. Most of the band was hiss. There was no AM station intermod -- that was really good. A lot of Longwave radios would have all sorts of local AM station images. Not so with the PL-398.
That's when I heard 'MOG' on 404 kHz (I also heard it on 405 at 2 kHz bandwidth). I was floored. First, I had never heard an 'MOG' beacon before. Secondly, I was actually hearing something on the Longwave band!
Then I heard another beacon on 326 kHz -- 'DC'. I was amazed.
And, even more amazing, the two beacons came in better on my Tecsun PL-398MP than they did on my Radio Shack DX-398.
Using my phone, I looked up the beacons. I finally found a list -- Mr. William Hepburn's Longwave Beacon List, located at DXInfoCentre.com. The link to this highly useful tool is here.:
MOG, 404 kHz, is in Montague, California. That's about 600 miles South of me (1000 km?). Montague is one of the small cities on the I-5 Corridor that was built as a whistle stop and rail junction between the Southern Pacific Railroad, 'coastal' line and nearby Yreka, the county seat of Siskiyou County where Montague is located. Montague, Yreka, Hornbrook, Dunsmuir, Weed -- all these little cities are in one of the most beautiful areas of California, all of them in Siskiyou County. Montague and Yreka are in a dry, Mediterranean, semi-arid patch of cattle country south of the Siskiyou Mountains and east of the Klamath / Coast range.
Driving through this area on Interstate 5 is a treat -- it's very unpopulated, with lots of gold and green countryside to enjoy. It reminds me of pictures I've seen of the inner, near-Outback of Australia, the regions around Bathurst, Orange, Albury, etc. Not desert, but not exactly rainy or well forested, either. Here in the US we call it 'cattle country', but there is quite a bit of what appears to be irrigation agriculture in the Siskiyou County region around Yreka and Montague, too.
And Montague has a small airport which serves Yreka as well as other nearby towns in the region.
The MOG beacon is a navigational aid for pilots -- sort of a backup navaid for pilots traversing that fairly hilly and mountainous area. It's a 50 Watt transmitter, so the fact I heard it as clearly as I did was pretty amazing.
Princeton, BC, is a small city located in a dry valley just east of the Cascade Mountain divide. It's a mining town on BC's Highway 3, and apparently they have an airport there, which has the 'DC' Beacon on 326 kHz. The beacon runs at 500 Watts. I suppose the beacon hasn't been yanked yet because in a mountainous area perhaps redundancy in your navigational aids is a good idea.
We went through Princeton, BC when I was a kid. There was another mining town, Hedley, maybe 15-20 miles SE of Princeton, that looked really cool, with this abandoned, dilapidated, massive mining complex (with all sorts of woodframe buildings and mining apparatus) covering the hillside just outside of town. It looked as if it hadn't been operated in 50 years, although that might have just been my first impression. Hedley and Princeton (and neighboring town Keremeos) are in the Similkameen Valley, a fairly arid region with pine trees.
The complex I saw may have been either the Mascot Gold Mine, or its Concentrator. I'm not sure. There is information on the Mascot Mine on its Wiki here.:
Either way, it was a surprise to hear ANYTHING on Longwave, much less to learn that the PL-398 does really well on Longwave.
The Tecsun is even better on LW than my fabled DX-398: 'MOG' on my Tecsun PL-398MP came in at S1-S2 signal levels. On my DX-398 -- with the LSB filter maxing the signal -- it was S0.3 or so.
In my PL-398 article I said "Longwave Is Dead". Well, maybe it's too soon to dance on Longwave's grave. There still are some beacons to hear. If you look over Mr. Hepburn's LW NDB listing (linked previously) you'll notice that a lot of the beacons are in the Farn North of Canada -- and many of them are fairly powerful. Other high power NDBs are in Alaska and Greenland. So there still is much to log. I guess it's time for me to build a Longwave Crate Loop antenna. :-)
I noticed that the lower MW band was more active than usual, so obviously, the 300-600 kHz section of radio spectrum was cooperating with my radios that night.
Of course, last night, the 18th, I tuned the LW band and heard nothing. The lower MW band wasn't all that hot, either, so it stands to reason.
Still, one wonders why the Longwave band over the past year or so still sounds so dead, especially if there are still some stations (in Canada) to hear. Maybe it's the crappy DX conditions we've had during this Solar Cycle that's the problem. For example, the SAK beacon out of Kalispell, Montana, 515 kHz, used to be semi-regular on my Panasonic RF-B45 in 2012-2014, but I haven't heard it since 2015 or so.
It's still apparently on the air, according to Mr. Hepburn's list, which seems to get updated periodically. But SAK has been a total no-show on the radios.
TWO MORE BEACONS, FOR A TOTAL OF FOUR!
Since the night of St. Patrick's, when I heard those two LW beacons, I've since logged two more! On the night of the 19th (early a.m. on the 20th) I tuned the Longwave band on my PL-398, and this time I used the 1 kHz bandwidth only.
That seems to be the best way to tune the LW band with a PL-398 -- other Tecsuns may be similar. Tune the Longwave band frequency by frequency, at the 1 kHz bandwidth setting. If you hear the slight whoosh of the carrier signal, stop, turn the radio to peak the carrier (as I said, the loopstick is very directional on a PL-398!), and listen for the Morse Code identifier.
Be sure to peak the signal by turning the radio. PL-398's loopstick is actually very directional on Longwave, as it is on Mediumwave -- something I didn't really pay attention to previously.
On the night / early a.m. of March 19th/20th (about 3 a.m. local time) I once more heard 'MOG' on 404 kHz out of Montague, 'DC' on 326 kHz out of Princeton, and two new beacons: 'EX' on 374 kHz out of Kelowna, BC, and 'SX' on 368 kHz out of Cranbrook, BC.
Kelowna is maybe 200-220 miles away as the crow flies, and Cranbrook -- located in the Kootenay region of Eastern British Columbia -- is over 350 miles away, so it's not a bad job for these relatively low powered beacon stations.
So, I suppose I've found a new wrinkle in the radio DX hobby. Seeing if any Longwave is actually out there -- I'm up to 4 stations, and counting!
Either way, I guess the lesson learned here is to not give up. Never give up.
This is my dancing Leprechaun. My former girlfriend, Sheryl Phillips, who is no longer with us (she passed away suddenly and unexpectedly in June, 2021) gave me this decoration for St. Patrick's Day in 2012. I sometimes leave him up on my wall because he's a happy looking guy. If you pull the string that is hanging just beneath his feet, he dances.
IN OTHER LIFE...
With that said, it's been Saint Patrick's Day here, a holiday I used to celebrate, but haven't in a long time. There is no reason to celebrate. My car is back from repair, but I'm still hesitant to use it. I guess the turmoil I went through having it towed 3-4 times, and a repair two and a half months ago that didn't fix the problem, made me very edgy about trusting the car. I'm certain the car is fixed, but every time I get in it, it's like "is it going to conk on me this time, too?"
I'll get there. The phone line / internet line was finally fixed after three tries (he found a dependable twisted pair) -- I suppose once the mechanics / techs get it right, you're set for another few years... That's life.
The weather here has been warming, and invigorating. I actually cracked open the window to my bedroom two nights ago, and I didn't freeze to death. :-) It's 45-55F outside at night now, and it's starting to feel like a normal Spring.
That helps. Hopefully it holds.
I've got a lot of stuff to get done around here this year, and for much of it I really need sunlight.
And with that, my friends, I'll close this article.
Peace.
C.C. March 17th and 18th, 2024.
March 20th: I added 2 new loggings, and more information on how to use the PL-398 when DXing the Longwave band (tune frequency by frequency on 1 kHz bandwidth). I also added a little bit more info on Siskiyou County, California, as it is indeed a beautiful place.
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