Links

Asian DX news

Internet Buying tips
for the Indian DXer
 

Supratik Sanatani's DX page

Old Dx news
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

In 1975 as a schoolboy I took fancy to my fathers gramophone which also had a 5 band 6 tube radio receiver attached to it. It was made by  HMV EMI of India. After some tweaking I fixed a piece of long wire to its aerial port and it sounded great. That was to launch me into this exciting hobby. For much of the time I had it hooked to a 15 m long wire .We then lived perched atop a hill in the Chotanagpur region of the then Bihar in India. The reception was great and it was very sensitive receiver but the bands were rather crowded and there was no band spread. That made adjacent channel QRM difficult. Later on I rigged a Beat Frequency Oscillator (BFO) and managed to tune into the SSB bands.

 ICF 7600D which was generously loaned to me by my DX friend Babul Gupta was my next receiver. It performed well and through the later eighties and early nineties I did lot of Dxing and monitoring using it. It even traveled with us during our Honeymoon trip! Since I was moving, most of the time I had do with a modest piece of wire as an antenna.

In the mid nineties I managed to reactivate an defunct RCA AR 88 which was initially procured by Tripti Ranjan  Basu but we were not getting the right person to set it right.Then we had this ailing gentleman who set it right.Rigged to a 25 m long wire, it did great and during the last sunspot low I would hear streaming rows of PNG stations. Then the efficient technician passed away and though others managed to set it right temporarily, they later gave up on it. I haven't given up on it though but last time some thing serious seems to gone wrong with the set. It has been quite some times since the AR88 last worked.

Around the same time Prodyut lent me his aged Sony 2001which inspite of some stumbling was functioning remarkably well.Unfortunately I did not have a stable antenna to do justice this old work horse.Another vintage with me at that time was a refurbished Philips Holland of 1950 which had a good band spread and nice audio and it really boomed the common easy listening stations.It was first located by Tripri Ranjan Basu in a radio repair shop.

It was then that I itched to have yet another receiver and I suddenly realized that the internet had made buying receivers from India so simple. So now I am with ICOM R75. I have a 25 m long wire attached to it and I am about to put up a 150 m long wire bang in the middle of this crowded city Kolkata

Supratik Sanatani  athena_eye@vsnl.com

History page