A description of my listening station, equipment, and a few notes</a>

A Description of My Listening Station, Equipment, and a Few Notes

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My Listening Station

For radio equipment I have a Uniden BC-200 XLT (great
scanner, lots of mods), a Pro-35 (great scanner, but no mods
except keyboard ones!), a Pro-25, a Pro-52 scanners, a Uniden
Bearcat 5, an Electro AC-100 shortwave receiver, an old K-Mart
special receiver, and various jury-rigged devices and receivers.
For transceiving equipment I have lots of CB's including a
President JFK and a Midland 77-888 in the car, a Uniden PC-122
SSB for a base, and plenty of others. Never have gotten into
amateur radio (except listening). Maybe someday...
Also, I keep my ear to my friend's and acquaintance's
scanners (as well as use their help, of course).
I have a number of different antennas. At my home I have a
real heavy duty Army-surplus mast (much better then the cheap
Radio Shack ones) held to the house with brackets and three guy
lines. On the mast is a Realistic all-band scanner base antenna
and a Solarcon Antron-99 11-meter base antenna (which makes a
great antenna for the lower bands, also). At the highest point
they reach fifty two feet and six inches. I am currently working
on a home-made satellite dish from a textfile I got off the
Internet but haven't worked out all the details of how I'm going
to put that up.
I have a system worked out so that the whole set up can be
raised and lowered by only one person (me) via a pulley and rope
system attached to the bumper of my car. Usually it only takes
an hour or so to drop and raise the whole thing (not including
the time it would take to do routine maintenance or whatever
needs to be done to it).
For mobile use I have a Realistic mobile multi-band scanner
antenna, a K-40 flexible, and the regular AM-FM car antennas as a
backup as well as a high-quality Formula One for moving from car-
to-car.
Portable antennas include the stock rubber duckies, a Radio
Shack extendible metal antenna (really pulls them in!), and a
modified car rubber ducky on a long cable.
I also use and have used a large number of home-made wide-
band and band-specific antennas for mobile, base, and portable
use; which I have used in various circumstances and locations in
the area.
At my home everything is fairly well protected by a pair of
elaborate burglar alarm systems as well as many nosy neighbors...
The car also has a burglar alarm but usually the more
expensive equipment isn't left in it.

And lastly, it took tons of work compiling all this
information together as well as daily spare-time listening and
logging.
I compiled this list originally on a Commodore 128 computer
system with all the goodies. Now, I use a 486 DX2 66 MHz (built-
in math co-processor - a definite must for heavy-duty data &
number crunching) with a 256 kb disk cache (makes a difference!)
& VESA Local Bus, SVGA Monitor, a couple of hard drives,
Sound Blaster stereo sound card (decodes morse code right off the
mike as well as some other cool stuff I haven't gotten around to
trying yet, like fax and satellite picture reception), 14,400
baud fax/modem, grey-scale hand scanner (2 to 256 shades), Sony
CD-ROM, and lots of other great stuff.
For an operating system I use the 32-bit Windows 95 Ver 3.95
- build version 4.00.950a which comes with Microsoft DOS
7.00 A and for software I primarily use Lotus Approach database
and Microsoft Works for Windows (a nice and very easy-to-use
database/word processor/spreadsheet, tried Word Perfect - I
hate it).
Other software I've used for this manual and/or use for
radio-related activities - Mustek's Scankit Utility, Perceive
OCR, ProComm Plus v2.11 for Windows (both the modem and fax
features, ProComm's Host script which I modified for my specific
uses as well as a voice/fax/voice-sharing script I created, Edit
Master 2.6 beta 1, Boxer Editor, TextCon (textfile format
converter), AutoKey 2.1, View 9.9g, The World, PC USA,
World Time, BASICBASIC, QBASIC, PASCAL, C--, WinCMD, (the former
five for making conversion programs and utilities I couldn't find
anywhere else), WinZip for Win95, SBPMorse (based on the program
FFT Morse) for morse code decoding, Spectragram (spectral
analysis program for DTMF decoding), MicFFT Fourier Spectrum
Analyzer, Freq (FFT Spectrum Analyses), PC-Track (satellite
tracker), TrakSat (another satellite tracker), Quick Circuit,
Electron (electronics calculations), Electric & Electronics
Formula program, WinPlot, Shortwave Listener's Guide Program,
Weatherman (satellite weather map radiofacsimile receiver
program), FFT Frequency Analyses (pick out weak signals),
SlowScan TV, Metricalc, Judy's TenKey Calculator, Convert It!,
Multi-Print, WinProof, WinSpell, Win Thesaurus, Interlink,
Shareweb (for simple networking), Matcher for Win95, WinASCII,
SmartDoc 95, and a number of conversion programs and utilities
that I had to program myself.
I also use a Panasonic 270 Business Partner (great little
computer for being an old 286!) and I sometimes use an old 286 I
made myself from spare parts running Windows 3.11 on 1 meg of ram
(!) with a 2400 baud modem and a simple network, a very, very old
IBM PC with an external 2400 baud modem and simple network
capabilities, an old ITT Xtra (early PC-XT clone) and two old
surplus fax machines (thanks John F.!). I also sometimes lend
out the old computers to those less fortunate or who have a dead
computer...

I use the Web-it (32-bit version) program and Netscape Gold 3.01 to display my page and the plain ol' Windows 95 notepad to edit the HTML code.

--A drawing of my antenna system--

Member of the

Site first online on December 10, 1996
Last modified on Saturday June 14 1997.
Copyright (©) 1996, 1997 Marc E. Mosher
All Rights Reserved
Custom webpages and other computer help - HMI Enterprises
E-mail - lectrichead@bigfoot.com / Page me online

A Description of My Listening Station, Equipment, and a Few Notes

My Listening Station

--*A drawing of my antenna system*--

--A drawing of my antenna system--