I'm new to shortwave with a Realistic DX-200

[D_Lacasse]

Hi everybody,
New SWL from Halifax, Nova Scotia here; I've been wanting to get into shortwave radio for a while now and I just purchased my first receiver, a Realistic DX-200, for $35. I was wondering if anybody had any tips on how to get the most out of it. It seems to be in very good condition and to work like new. I've got a few general questions but any tips at all would be appreciated since I'm just jumping into this feet first; I've been doing a lot of reading but I still know very little about the specifics of short-wave listening.

I'm wondering specifically what the best bet is for an antenna given my situation. I live in a very small, second-story apartment in a house, where I can't attach anything external. I'm on the top floor and the house doesn't have an attic, so my ceiling is reasonably close to the roof of the building. I'm also working with a very limited budget. Just so I could start picking things up, I improvised an antenna from the power cord on an old lamp, first just cutting the cord off from the lamp and the plug and attaching it to the radio antenna, which helped a little; then I split the cord down the middle and rejoined it, doubling the length to about 10 feet or so, which drastically improved things. Today I experimented further by attaching an old mattress spring to the far end of the cord and hung it and the rest of the cord up by the ceiling and I got some pretty decent results, including a really strong signal from the Voice of Turkey today at about 8PM.

My understanding is that longer cable = better reception, so I'm thinking of getting a spool of cable and just stringing it around the ceiling of the apartment, or at least the main room. Will this make a relatively serviceable antenna? What are the major drawbacks with a setup like that?

I was also wondering about the necessity of grounding the antenna if I'm going to be using an "antenna" like that. I've been running it ungrounded so far and my high-tech lamp cord / mattress spring antenna has been bringing in some pretty distant stations as is. Will grounding the antenna improve my reception significantly? Will it reduce interference? Given the situation with my apartment, a ground-spike is pretty much out of the question, so is there a workable and safe way to ground the antenna from where I am in the house? Can I just run a wire from the ground terminal on the back of the radio to the ground prong on the power cable for the radio itself?

Any advice you're able to give would be much appreciated. Many thanks!

 

[D_Lacasse]

Also, the analog slide-rule display for the main tuning has been aggravating me somewhat, it's very imprecise and there's a lot of white space on it. How difficult would it be to take the display out, add some more precise measurements by hand, and then replace it while making sure it stayed accurate? Since it measures in mhz and only goes to one decimal place, trying to tune in a specific station is often pretty much just guesswork, which is frustrating, but I don't want to mess with it if there's a high risk of throwing off the dial's accuracy entirely

 

[Captain Kilowatt]

Hi D_Lacasse welcome to the forum. I am one of the admins here and just live in the valley the other side of Windsor Hants. County. As for the antenna yeah you are pretty much limited as to what you can do in an apartment. Been there done that but at least I had an attic space to use. The best bet is to use as long a piece of wire that you can string up around the room. Best place is where the walls meet the ceiling. Try a complete loop around one room and see how that works. You can also try running it around a couple rooms but don't have it fold back on itself very much if you can avoid it. No need to ground an indoor antenna but you can try connecting the ground terminal or the chassis to the electrical ground. It may make a difference and it may not. Experiment and see what works best for you.As for dial accuracy, yeah that radio sucks in that department. It's pretty much tune and find out later what you are listening too as opposed to tuning directly to a station. Not a great deal that can be done with that. Back in the hey day of SWL there were companies that actually made a digital readout that could be wired into most analog receivers to provide an accurate display of frequency but those days are long gone I am afraid.

 

[D_Lacasse]

Thanks for the help! When you say a loop around the room, do you mean that the cord should make contact with itself, or should the far end be loose?

 

[Captain Kilowatt]

Just leave it loose. You can try any configuration really. Can't hurt anything and one config may work betterthan another sometimes and not others. Try and keep it away grom sources of electrical noise like fluorescent lights etc.