Many thanks to my friend Ollie–an SWL in Germany–who shares the following guest post:
German spies are eavesdropping on you!
I recently made the first all-night listening sessions at the German North Sea coast for this year. On the night of June 10th/11th I picked up 2 POTA SSB activations over here and I thought you guys might find it mildly interesting what that sounds like here. 🙂 Condx were just going down from “slightly elevated” to “regular solar minimum” values that evening.
RX was an Icom IC-705, antenna is a 10m/33′ lazy monopole (running 10m wire vertically up a fiberglass pole, no counterpoise, no matching network, balun, flux capacitor, just a wire and pretty conductive ground).
Video: KI5OLV activating K6574 (Lower Neches Wildlife Management Area, TX), around 1:40 UTC
Video: W8CFS activating K-1552 (Warren Dunes State Park, MI), around 23:00 UTC, condx to the stateside were dipping at that time
I don’t know that W8CFS had brought to his park, KI5OLV brought an IC-7100 and was running its 100W into a hamstick antenna on his truck. Nothing to learn from that really, I’m just happy I can hear y’all! 🙂
73s, Ollie
Speaking of German radio listeners… https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-history/dawn-of-electronics/inside-the-third-reichs-radio
Were you aware of the noctilucent clouds on that photo? Well done!
Hi Mike, interesting article, even drawing a connection between the obvious purpose of these radios and modern social media. There’s also a little glitch:
“The Volksempfänger’s radio dial was not marked off in frequencies but rather listed the names of cities—Frankfurt and Heidelberg are among the cities on the…” <- Until 1937 all VEs(and the DKE) had a 0-100 log scale w/o station names, then the VE301Wn introduced station names *and* frequency markings, also Heidelberg was never on the dial.
Returning to 2021, the term "Volksempfänger" is still in use: That's what German hams jokingly call the IC-7300 (because there's one in every (ham) household). 🙂
Hi Frank, the pic was edited for contrast and saturation and I noticed that only after editing, but I wasn’t entirely sure if that was true NLCs or just regular cirrus getting their first sunlight from the north (but it looks much like NLC indeed).
In the middle of this clip
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1AqzhDaoYs
I briefly swept the cam over the sky to show the magnificent NLC display on June 21st, 2019 during the BBC Antarctic Midwinter Broadcast, That is unedited (and alas pretty blurry) video.
73!
Ollie