Svar till: SAQ Receiver Gallery

[rich.g.williams]

“Would you dare driving an old-timer ralley with a modern Formula-1 racing car ? Certainly not !
Receiving an old-time transmitter with a soundcard and a PC or an SDR is as well improper style or even bad taste, but in no way a remarkable achievement.
Everybody can do so !”

This is a very unfair comment I say this for the following reasons:

– The original Kungsbacka Receiver Station, it is noted that the Receiver antenna “consisted of two copper wires set up on 9 m tall telephone poles along a stretch of about 13.4 km, over Kungsbackaån and southeast out through Hanhals and Fjärås parishes to Skärsjön on the south side of Lygnern” So how many of us have access to such a 13.4 km length antenna.

– I want to receive SAQ transmission in Cardiff Wales UK and my garden allows for a 25 metre wire antenna so must use “every trick in the book” to receive SAQ with certainty at good signal strength.
– To build a simple tuned receiver modern electronics is easiest and to avoid need for hardware BFO etc its easy to record the 17200 Hz carrier directly using a Laptop PC (at 48 k samples/sec) and use software to detect the Morse code.

My belief is that the SAQ transmission propagates around the globe so for people trying to receive in the opposite hemisphere use of modern electronics and software processing is essential.

Also to be perfectly honest I have looked at some of the old receiver designs and to me they look very bloated, over complicated, difficult to understand and difficult to build – they do not follow the most important designers commandment which is “keep it simple”

I agree that existing receivers built originally should be looked after and kept safe but I do not agree that people should be encouraged to rebuild those old designs in the 21st Century.