Clever Radios

ThisThisI now have a Tecsun PL365 radio which is rather unique in several ways.
Looking at the radio at first glance you could be forgiven for thinking the radio was a cordless phone handset, that’s the type of design we’re looking at with the Tecsun PL365 but just because the radio is small doesn’t limit the radio in capabilities.
Packed inside this little beauty is a fully fledged communications receiver without some of the functionality admittedly of its bigger Brothers and Cousins but functional, useable and practical nevertheless.
Performance is good across all bands and tis is amazing given the size of the radio.
Again not to the standard of the big boys but good enough for most situations.
The radio has a 40CM long telescopic whip antenna aerial for FM and SW.
A built-in ferrite rod is used for AM however the radio does come with an extension antenna socket for AM and takes full use of this with the supplied AM plug-in ferrite antenna.
This arrangement provides some great advantages over conventional ferrite antenna arrangements, the main being that the antenna can be “Homed” into the direction of the station you’re trying to receive.
The external Ferrite bar is only 3 inches long so don’t expect miracles from this antenna but its pretty good and adds directionality to the radio when receiving AM.
The external AM antenna jack means of course that bigger antenna units can be used such as a dedicated outdoor AM antenna or Tecsun’s own desktop tuneable loop antenna which plugs straight in.
Radio listeners will be pleased to know that the PL365 boasts a very nice SSB mode tuneable down to 10HZ which means that SSB reception of voice communications can be tuned to sound incredibly natural
As we’re talking SSB I think it time to mention the Shortwave coverage of the PL365 which goes all the way up to 30MHZ
Again performance on Shortwave is surprisingly good given the radio has such a short telescopic whip to work with, here’s to the benefits of DSP and SDR Radio yet again <smile>.
The radio has 500 memories though I’ve not got to the point of using those yet.
One function I’m looking forward to trying is the “Easy Tune” function.
The “Easy Tune” function is very similar to those auto scan functions you find on modern-day radio sets but the main difference being that “Easy Tune” puts the strongest signals it finds into a dedicated bank of temporary “Easy Tune” memory locations.
You can browse through these locations and transfer the stations stored there to permanent memory locations, a very similar arrangement is found on Radio Scanners.
The PL365 comes with a set of earbuds which sound perfectly reasonable and the radio receives FM stereo.
Buttons on the radio are about the size of match heads except for the power button which is big and rectangular in size.
The radio has no keypad, obviously the designers went with the idea of putting as much as is possible into memory and using the tuning thumb wheel to browse memory locations.
There is a micro USB port on the side of the radio though I haven’t been able to work out what this is for yet.
I’m powering the radio with 3 AA batteries which are stored in the bottom of the unit.
Speaker sounds a little tinny reminding me of the early transistor radio sets I had as a child, still perfectly listenable all the same and even better when using the supplied earbuds.
I bought my PL365 from Tecsun Radios Australia for $100 Australian so an absolute bargain.

Variable Voltage/Current Output Power supply

I know there are a few people out there who are into Electronic and DIY projects of the same nature like me.

Up until now I’ve found it very difficult to find power supply units that can be set accurately without vision and offering stable voltages.

Yes, some “Plug pack” units will allow quite a bit of flexibility these days but let’s face it, these units are of a low quality usually and don’t last too long.

Not only that they don’t have the voltage or current range required for good testing and are subject to RF interference or contribute to the RF interference in the immediate environment, as if we don’t have enough of that already.

I’ve found a Power Supply unit which is easy to set for blind people, incredibly accurate and incredibly quiet as far as RF noise goes.

You can see the power supply at https://www.jaycar.com.au/0-to-30vdc-0-to-5a-regulated-power-supply/p/MP3840?utm_campaign=redirect&utm_source=MP3840r&utm_medium=web

I’m writing from Australia so residents of the US will have to do a bit of digging to find a similar unit though residents of the UK shouldn’t have any trouble sourcing this supply as Jaycar also do business in the UK.

As you can see the supply has a voltage range of 0 to 30 volts and 0 to 5 amps so any value can be set in these ranges even fine voltage adjustments can be made – say 1.2 volts -.

The supply has 2 jog-dials on the face to control volts and amps.

These dials click when turned and push in.

Suppose you wanted to adjust the voltage to 4.5 volts.

After turning the supply on you would press the voltage jog-dial once and turn 4 clicks clockwise, press the jog-dial in to advance to the next unit and turn the dial clickwise 5 clicks.

The beauty of this supply is that you hear a beep when you’ve reached the minimum or maximum value so you can count up or down by click from these points, the count doesn’t wrap around so once you’re say at 30 volts the unit will beep and stay at 30 volts unless you turn the voltage dial anti clockwise to bring the voltage count down.

The supply remembers the last settings made when the power is turned off.

I have also discovered power supplies available where voltage and current values can be set via an IOS or Android App.

The New updated Backpack Studio DJ IOS App

Well we’ll really going places With Backpack Studio now.
I’ve been using the App for ages and over that time the Backpack Studio – Formally Bossjock – has become increasingly more powerful whilst keeping the flexibility and accessibility of the App at the users fingertips.
The latest version of Backpack Studio brings yet another breakthrough in my opinion and that is the ability to Stream your broadcast over the Internet right from the Backpack Studio App so this means we now have a pretty much full suite of broadcasting/DJ tools available from one App.
Broadcast whatever you want with the effects you need, the songs that your audience wants to hear, all the stingers and jingles you create and more broadcast over the Internet, recorded in real time etc.
I enjoy using Backpack Studio on my iPad Pro as it gives me plenty of room with which to work and I can assign as many Cart Decks as I need in a session.
If you don’t have an iPad Pro then you can use Backpack Studio affectively though you will need to do a lot more scrolling to get to those extra Cart Players you may wish to use.
An iTunes library is not required though for some an iTunes Library may be a good start.
You can pretty much import your music from anywhere, Dropbox, Google Drive and so on as well as from your IOS device itself.
I hope the next move considered by the developers of Backpack Studio is the ability to take music directly from Spotify or Tidal for your Broadcast Playlist.

I’ve since learnt of a pole taken by the developers of Backpack Studio and it seems the bulk of users would like to see an Android App.

Check the pole out for yourself at 

Thoughts on DAB+ Radio in Australia and Associated Topics

DAB+ Digital Radio has been a part of the radio landscape in most metropolitan areas within Australia for 10 years now.
I joined the DAB+ club for a want of a better description a year later with the purchase of a Roberts Ecologic 4 radio just before Easter in 2010.
At the time of purchase I was amazed at the sound produced by the stations on the DAB+ band.
10 years on I thought it time to write up some notes on DAB+, how the format has changed for better or for worse over the 10 years of its existence, my thoughts on the format now, where has Australia gone wrong and any other notes or analysis that spring to mind.
First to DAB+ receivers and I’ve had quite a few.
Most have been excellent radio sets but some have been absolutely rotten.
It seems that at the time of writing this post the general crop of DAB+ sets available these days are cheap and nasty but then again if the quality of the sound of the DAB+ stations isn’t anything to write home about these days then cheap radio sets are probably the way to go as they’re not quality radios as I enjoyed.
There are a couple of sets which – if the DAB+ standard ever improves here – will provide you with a pleasurable listen and I’ll talk about those in another post.
Some of the sets I’ve enjoyed over 9 years include the above mentioned Roberts Ecologic 4 which is regarded by people I regular correspond with as a “Classic”, I won’t argue that point.
My next DAB+ purchase in September 2010 was a Yamaha TX-130 which to my ears was one of the best sounding tabletop DAB+ radio systems ever to have come my way complete with CD player, iPhone dock etc.
Unfortunately the radio was a little complicated to use and much of the technology the system provided has passed ups by. For example the iPhone dock is not compatible with the modern-day iPhone, the radio has no internet connectivity of any sort for and I’m not even sure there’s any way of updating firmware.
The Pure Mini was one of my favourite DAB+ radio sets, small and compact but again a little complex to use.
Sangean have always made what have turned out to be some of my very favourite radios and their DAB+ offerings are no exception whether the radio you want is a tabletop, hand-held, travel, portable stereo or tabletop radio.
Some years ago I bought myself a Network Powered Speaker – an active speaker system that connected to the home network and Internet – and.
The speakers I bought were of audiophile quality – B&W A5 and A7 speaker systems respectively -.
Tehse systems were incredibly flexible allowing content streaming to them and having analogue inputs in the case of the A5 and digital in the case of the A7 so a Dab+ Digital Radio or tuner with a digital output was required to get the best quality sound available through a high quality speaker system.
In 2017 I set about building up a Hi-Fi system in my Den which had to match 2 criteria for me.
Firstly the system had to be as accessible as possible which meant I had to find a way of accessing as many functions of all components as I could.
Rotel offered me a way to access most everything with the combination of their components including the Rotes T14 streamer.
Through the Rotes “14 Series” App I am able to control the Streamers built-in DAB+ tuner etc knowing what station I am tuned to, knowing what preset contains what DAB+ station etc.
I have used other Radios and Tuners in the past which have proved to be very accessible and controllable from other devices and I’ll detail these in future posts.
So that’s an incredibly brief summary of some DAB+ radios and tuners I’ve used over the past 9 years.
So do I enjoy DAB+ now? No I don’t and the main reason for that is overcrowding of the DAB+ band.
Whilst many people welcome the variety of DAB+ stations available I myself prefer quality over quantity, the more stations on the band then the worse the audio quality of the signals become.
DAB+ is a system where stations share the transmission signal which is decoded by your DAB+ radio so band width is limited.
Suppose you have a band width of 320K and you share that band width with 10 stations, each station will have a bandwidth of 32K which is extremely bad on the ears, imagine what encoding a MP3 file at 32K stereo would sound like.
Well that’s what we’re getting from our DAB+ band now so its often the case that listening to an Internet stream from a station will give you far better quality than you will hear on the DAB+ band.
Has Australia made a bad decision by embracing DAB+ Yes I believe Australia has gone down the wrong path and the electronics magazine Silicon Chip will back me here.
Australia is a land of distances so a digital system such as DRM seems to me to be a more practical solution.
DRM can use the standard AM Broadcast band and the modification for existing AM transmitters is easy to perform.
With a DAB+ signal the strength needs to be excellent or else no sound whatever.
With a DRM signal the strength needs to be good to receive the digital portion. If the signal falls below the threshold then the DRM set receives the standard analogue broadcast.
More posts coming on DAB+ and associated radio issues.

Twistedwave Another Audio Editor For The Mac

I’ve found another audio editor for the Mac called Twistedwave which is incredibly accessible and easy to use plus you get great value for money with the Lite version which I purchased to try as I figured that at $30? Well I couldn’t go too far wrong if the App wasn’t accessible or useable.
The Lite version has given me the idea to purchase the Pro version in the not too distant future.

Firstly the App uses cursor keys to get about so you would use say home to get to the beginning and end to get to the end of the file.
Left and right cursor keys move you through the file whilst up and down cursor keys change the length of that movement.
There are facilities to fine tune your selection and navigation.
For example the user can type a specific time at which to place the cursor in the file or use the selection editor to fine tune the beginning and end points of a selection.
Plenty of keyboard shortcuts exist and all can be edited to make the learning kerb a little easier if required.
Recording facilities are provided allowing recording from multiple inputs as well as punch-in recording.
Extra channels can be added to a recording though I’ve not explored this feature as yet but will certainly do so.
Twistedwave has an effects menu so the user can either use the provided effects or add their own efforts, VST and 64-bit are all supported.
Plenty of generation options such as tone generation, speech generation etc are also provided which is a nice convenient touch to any audio software.
My only complaint at this time is the lack of audio formats supported but that’s probably a restriction of the Lite version.
Sop long as a Lossless audio format is supported then I’m not worried as I have other tools to convert to such formats as FLAC and anything else outside the standard formats used on the Mac by apple.
The lite version of Twistedwave costs $30 from the Mac Apps Store.

Ring Doorbell Video II Impressions

I’ve had the Ring Video Doorbell 2 for a week now so thought I’d write down my impressions of the product.
Before that I had a Doorbell which I built around a Raspberry Pi machine however the machine packed up so I had to get something quickly.
I looked for Raspberry Pi Doorbell projects to build and boy has the landscape changed since I built mine back in 2013, if you go to Youtube and look for Raspberry Pi Doorbell you’ll soon see what I mean so plenty for me to choose from and to think about.
The Raspberry Pi I was using was of a considerable age and there have been several generations of Raspberry Pi since, I think we’re now up to the Third Generation? Anyway the newer Pi machines are far more powerful than the one I was using and offer far more flexible connectivity options but one thing at a time and back to the Ring Doorbell Video 2
The idea of the Ring Doorbell is to have the unit installed at a location while you use your Smart Phone to interact with the doorbell. My Ring Doorbell is installed at the front door.
If you have the old trusty electro mechanical type doorbell already installed then you can choose to have it work in parallel with the Ring Doorbell.
In my case I needed a sparky to come and give me a hand with my installation but if its just a case of sticking the Ring Doorbell on a wall then you should be able to perform the whole  installation job yourself.
Depending on the type of\The Ring Doorbell has several power options and the one you choose will depend on your installation requirements. I already have a mains supply installed for my doorbell requirements so the ring Doorbell can take advantage of that.
If you’re just going to stick the doorbell on a wall then you can use the supplied rechargeable battery which clips into the bottom of the Doorbell unit.
Connecting the Ring Doorbell to your network may take a little time and can be a little tricky so be sure to follow the prompts in the Ring App and be sure to create your account at http://www.ring.com which I suggest you do before you stat the setup process.
Its during the setup process that I started encountering disappointments with the Ring product.
Firstly the Ring Doorbell Video 2 will only connect to 2.4GHZ networks and the unit doesn’t have a LAN port which is odd given the Doorbell will be mounted most likely in most homes in a fixed position.
The Setup procedure in the Ring App was quite easy to follow and I have everything connected in around 10 minutes along with having completed tests to ensure that the doorbell was functioning as required.
Ring sends you a couple of optional eMails containing tips and so on which are worth reading.
The settings panels in the Ring App seem perfectly accessible.
So now to actually trying the Ring Doorbell out with my mobile phones and here I started to get annoyed.
When the Ring Doorbell detects motion or the button is pushed to ring the Doorbell a notification is sent to your phone.
In order to interact with the person at your door you have to interact with the notification on your phone so that means that you not only have to unlock your phone – if it is locked – but enter your Fingerprint or facial ID before you can even interact then with the Ring Screen.
The Screen contains several buttons including an “Accept” button which you can double-tap to start viewing video form your doorbell or speak to the person at your front door.
And here’s another thing to be wary of, the orientation of your phone is changed to landscape regardless of your orientation preference so you may need to change your method when you try to navigate the Ring App screen whilst interacting with the Doorbell.
The interactivity can be ended by double-tapping on the “End” button in the Ring App.
There is an easier way with which to interact with the Ring Doorbell by the use of an Echo Show or Echo Spot device and your voice.
You Suppose the Doorbell rings you can say to Echo Show, “Alexa View Front Door” where upon the Doorbell will be activated and you can start interacting with the person at your Front door.
The video is displayed on the Echo Show or Spot screen and you can talk to the person at your front door using hands free on the Echo Show or Spot device.
Note that the Ring Doorbell Video 2 cannot work with an Echo or Echo dot device which is a shame. Okay the Dot etc aren’t capable of receiving video but they do receive audio and the quality of audio the Echo Dot 3rd Generation and Echo put out is very reasonable.
As for the audio quality of the Ring Doorbell itself? Well I can describe it best as very average but certainly not too bad. I would have liked to see a control for volume of audio on the Doorbell itself. In most situations this should be loud enough for the person at the front door to hear but certainly not in reasonably noisy environments, say near a road with a lot of traffic running up and down.
Extra chime and camera units can be installed and I intend to experiment with a couple of extra chimes around the house.

Zoom F8n Recorder

The Zoom F8N is the most advanced audio recorder I have ever had the pleasure of working with.

I have Youtube to thank in helping me get started with this recorder. All one has to do to start learning about the emended power and performance of the Zoom F8N recorder is look it up on Youtube and watch the many video reviews etc.

I did worry about how I would use the F8N given the recorder is menu driven and one needs to see the display to access the recorder.

Thankfully Zoom have seen fit to have dedicated buttons for the main functions of the recorder they bing transport and track selection controls so one can literally connect up the recorder to equipment and start recording right away without having to go into the menu system.

The track buttons have tactile markings so the controls for each track – selection and level adjustment etc – are easily identified.

The menu system is easy to call up by pressing the appropriate button and navigation is accomplished by the use of a rotary Jog dial, each click clockwise and anti clockwise moves forward and backward through the menu system respectively.

The selection is activated by pressing the dial in.

To move out of a function in the menu press the menu button.

The menu system doesn’t wrap as far as I can tell so a good turn of the dial in the appropriate direction will take you to beginning and end of the respective menu branch.

Unfortunately the menu doesn’t default at either the start or the end when the menu button is pressed so you will need to use the dial as described above to get to either end of the menu branch.

Compiling notes on the menu structure is taking me quite a bit of time as the system is deep.

ALTEC LANSING EXPRESSIONS ULTRA 2.1 SPEAKER SYSTEM

The following review was sent to a mailing list, felt it good enough for me to quote in my own blog since I wrote the review myself in the first place <smile>.

 

Hi folks!

About a fortnight ago I wrote to the list discussing the new Altec Lansing Expressions Plus speaker system I’d bought then, I’m extremely happy with it.

I had thought when I bought this system that the Expressions Plus was the top of the line 2.1 speaker system model Altec Lansing manufactured but I was wrong.

Yep, I could have taken the speakers back from where I bought them but as my one of my other sets was wearing out anyway it made sense for me to replace that with the expressions Plus and buy the new Altec Lansing Expressions Ultra system for my main computer system in the back room.

The Expressions Ultra is the top of the line 2.1 speaker system Altec Lansing make at the moment and boy! what a monster we’re talking about here.

The system consists of 4 components, 2 2-way speakers that can sit on a desk, a small control panel that sits on the desk beside you and a monster sub-woofer that looks more like a PC tower case, you can sit this in a shelf, on the floor etc.

5 separate digital amplifiers drive this system with 200 wats total power, most of which is used by the sub-woofer to shake the floor or whatever.

If considering this system then you’ll need to devote a little time to the unpacking, Altec Lansing in my view ought to win an ward for environmental vandals, I’ve never seen so much plastic tape, bag, foam and other rubbish in a box.

Once everything was unpacked and accounted for it was time to wire and then power up.

Wiring up is simple enough, each of the speakers and control panel plug into sockets via cables on the sub-woofer, it appears that all the plugs are different so their’s no chance of plugging the wrong speaker into the wrong socket, plugging the control panel into one of the speaker sockets etc.

So upon turning the system on I heard sweet sweet sound so time to control the system with the control panel to hear just what the system offered my ears.

The panel has 3 buttons and a rotary know, when this is turned as a volume knob it increases or decreases the volume and here’s where things become interesting.  If you turn the knob slightly then volume increases or decreases gradually, turn the knob a little more then the rate of volume adjustment increases so be prepared for a few shocks.

1 button on the panel changes the knob for volume adjustment to bass adjustment, another changes from volume to treble adjustment and the small button in the middle of the panel turns the system on and off – there’s a main power switch on the back of the sub-woofer which turns everything off.

There are 2 sockets on the side of the panel, one for line in and the other for headphones which I’ve found terribly convenient.

I have the 2 speaker units on my desktop shelf and their they stand proudly, Altec Lansing have done a good job with the design of these units, many speakers I’ve seen are extremely flimsy and can easily be knocked over but not these, they stand on an angle held by 2 rubber feet at the front and the protrusion at the rear.

No doubt about it, these are the absolute best I’ve heard in the class of a 2.1 channel system and I wonder what a better 2.1 channel system could give the ears that this one couldn’t.  As far as I’ve been able to determine most of the spectrum is easily heard, crisp highs, very nice mid range and earth shattering low.

I did wonder why 200 watts for a speaker package which you’re pretty much sitting right in front of? Well I don’t wonder any more, when I’m playing games with things exploding all around me I just sit and enjoy the noise or when listening to my favourite music I sit and listen for as long as I can, these speakers give total enjoyment to my ears.

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More radio Talk

Back after a rather long absence.

 

I did promise to talk about 3 Tabletop radio sets from Sangean some time ago and I hereby keep my word and actually go somewhat further.

 

4 sets to review in all including the new version of the Sangean ATS-909 mid-sized portable shortwave receiver but.. well one thing at a time.

 

So to the baby of the 3 tabletop receivers from Sangean and we’re talking FM/AM tabletop or mantle radios here.

 

Nothing special about the WR11 in its controls, just a plain selector knob to select band and power on/off, a volume knob and a large tuning dial which feels very smooth when turned so as you can guess we’re talking good  old fashioned analogue tuning radio here.

 

The WR11 is in a wooden cabinet with a glossy finish and you know the cabinet is wood instantly! by the sound of the radio, remember those wooden radios that perhaps your Mum or Grand Parents had? This sounds very similar and in fact all the radios var the last I’m going to talk about are all in wooden cabinets.

 

The WR11 boasts a 3 inch speaker and a bass port at the rear.

 

Several connections enhance the radio, a stereo headphone out, line out, line in, AM and ext FM antenna jacks.  As well as the AC mains connection you’ll find a DC input jack which will take a range of voltages from 9-14V to power the radio so this makes the set versatile for quite a range of different power environments.

 

As one would expect this radio is incredibly sensitive and more so because it uses an analogue tuning circuit.  Performance of FM is good particularly on an external antenna.

 

The radio comes with an external indoor antenna for FM or you can switch to the built-in FM antenna and if you’re looking to receive stations quite some distance away from you then the built-in FM antenna is not recommended.

 

I paid $200.00 for this radio about 6 months ago but check with your local Sangean dealer as prices have changed.

 

The next model I’ll be reviewing is the WR2, the slightly bigger Brother to the wr11, similar in looks but very different in functionality.

 

 

Shopping with your Iphone/Ipad at Woolworths in Australia

The below is extract of a message I sent to an email list regarding the new Woolworths Supermarket app for iPhone, will work with iPad too!

 

So you do your grocery shopping every week and you want to be absolutely organised? Then here’s the best app I’ve seen to help you “organise” your shopping and its free!

Note that the Woolworths app is only available in Australia as far as I know.

This app does everything you’d expect a shoppers helper to do and far more.  Firstly, it can locate your nearest store and thus will display the local stores product catalogue and appropriate weekly specials if any, you can then browse all of these and add what you want to your shopping list where you can edit, manipulate by increasing or decreasing the amount of an item or items required, email your list to someone or an address in your contacts list etc.

The app is fully accessible with Voiceover with plenty of help screens and tips available should you find yourself lost in the software.

The app tells in where to find items, for example if you add a kilo of apples to your shopping list of a particular type, the Woolworths app will tell you in what row to look and this is displayed in your shopping list so you can send someone down to the supermarket and they’ll know exactly where to find an item.

Have some products in your pan tree you wish to order again but can’t remember what the label says so you’ve no idea what to search for? No problem, the Woolworths app has an in-built bar code scanner, take the product from the pan tree, scan the bar code and the app will identify the product where upon you can add it to your shopping list.

I see wonderful potential for this app and full marks to the developers for what they’ve achieved with the app thus far, pity you can’t order a delivery but perhaps that will come in the future.

In short 2 words sum up my feelings regarding the Woolworths App, “Most Impressive”.