It had been a fun adventurous day and a chilly but pleasant evening. The campground was now completely deserted so I decided to give shortwave another try.
I had no idea why my awesome little radio (which had been flawless until Bigfoot messed with it) had gone nutty but I approached it with a needle in hand…
An aside about shortwave:
I own and highly recommend my TecSun PL-880. You can find it here on Amazon.
There are cheaper shortwave radios. In general, they suck. They’re cool as a concept (“I made a radio with two bottlecaps and a pack of Skittles crammed in an Altoids tin”) but in practice they’re a PITA. Unless you just plain like dinking around with crap gadgets, it’ll either sour you on shortwave or you’ll (like me) upgrade. Skip the wasted money of a stupid first step and start with something with decent quality. The PL-880 will set you back about $160 and it’ll probably work very well until the day you die… provided you don’t let Bigfoot get to it.
There are more expensive shortwave radios (which I haven’t owned). They’re awesome but they tend to have a drawback. They feel like work to me. They have so many “features” that you practically need a PhD in electromagnetics to operate them.
That’s why I settled on the PL-880 for the sweet spot of “damn good at receiving broadcasts”, “good quality to last”, and “you don’t need to hit shift/alt/menu/F6 to turn the damn thing on”.
One other note; the original, included, easily replaceable, rechargeable battery works incredibly well. I have mercilessly abused it… letting it go dead, forgetting about it for months, leaving it in a freezing cold truck, etc… It works great no matter what I do. (It recharges via USB.)
The PL-880 has a reset function. It’s one of those little things in which you stick a pin. I’ve never used it (never needed to). Having thawed out by the fire, made a fine meal, and finished half a flask of bourbon… I was in an ideal mood for using fine motor skills on delicate electronics in the pitch dark. I was going to reset the living shit out of the radio!
The best I can say is that the radio knew. I clicked it on and it worked flawlessly; as if to say “Wait! Not the needle! I’ll be good.” Indeed it worked so well (as it always had) that I suspect it was user error (gasp!) that caused the earlier problem. …or Bigfoot.
I put the needle away (much to the radio’s relief) and set it on the dark picnic table. Then I unleashed it to scan the universe. I like the PL-880’s scanning feature. It’s brainless enough that a Neandertal like me can use it. I like to extend the antenna and let it sniff about. I never know what it’ll find.
The world is a big place and it scanned for a while. Sometimes, it would pause on a signal too weak for me to care about. Sometimes it was something that came in strong but I didn’t care about what I was hearing. Occasionally, it would grab a signal out of the aether that was fascinating but I was too slow to find the radio in the dark and click the button to stop the scan. For a while I was listening to music in a language I didn’t recognize using instruments I also didn’t recognize. It was like synth-pop done with a theremin… if you asked a dog to explain it. That kept me occupied for a while. But always I’d come back to that scan button. I didn’t know what I was looking for but I suspected it was out there.
Eventually I found myself listening to one of the most beautiful and sorrowful songs I’d ever heard. I wrote down what the announcer said but I misspelled every damn word. It took a little internet sleuthing to reconstruct my half drunk chickenscratch. I think I was listening to “Alla Pavlova B 1953 Elegy For Piano And Strings 1998”. (Ugh, no wonder I spelled it wrong! You’d think they’d name things in a way I could remember! I never have a problem remembering “Tube Snake Boogie” or “Du Hast” by ZZ Top and Rammstein respectively.)
Anyway, if you’re feeling chill on a level that approaches catatonic you may be receptive to the song I heard as the moon rose over the dead silent pines:
In each day, there’s a moment that cannot be eclipsed. That was the moment.
Utterly relaxed clear to my soul, I turned in. That night I slept better than I have in six months. Sure it could have been the flask of bourbon, or the many miles of hiking in the hot sun, or the very cold ride home… but I like to think it was a moment of peak mellow penetrating the stress caused by 20 months of social madness. If I’d done nothing more this year than listen to that song, at that time, in that place… it would be a life lived well.
Stay tuned… there will be more.
You have not mentioned what frequencies you have been trying to siphon….does your radio have attachment points for external antennae? For a receiver, it does not have to be a perfect match, though getting close does help. Research “Beverage Over Ground” antenna and relax, it does not involve distributing ones imbibing fluid over the adjacent landscape. Keep up the good work, I love this serialised Journal, almost like being there myself.
I have no particular frequencies in mind. I can set the PL-880 to VF (view frequency) of VM (view memory). I set it to VF and then hit SCAN. It just chugs through the whole of each band looking for what it finds. That’s pretty crude but it works for me. You have to be careful because VM just scans among your memory presets and it’s easy to accidentally switch modes. If I find a good station, I might dump it into memory so I can find it again… but I’m pretty lazy about it.
It has all sorts of clock and “alarm clock” features… none of which I use. If I wanted an alarm clock, I wouldn’t be camping.
It has a port for an external antenna. I don’t have one but I might get one someday. I’m sure that would improve reception considerably… but the attached antenna ‘aint bad for what it is. It even came with a nice faux leather carrying case. Not rugged and waterproof but good enough for most purposes and it even looks spiffy.
I’m glad you like my serialized story. I have my doubts when I write some of them; “I went camping, so what”. I just hope people would enjoy a little second hand mellowness. Sounds like they do.
I’ve got an old Halicrafter in the shop. I’ve spent more on freight sending it to be fixed than it’s worth.. I Was gonna send it off again, but the tree I had the antenna in blew down,,
I could maybe get excited about a radio that sniffs around for a signal.
I used to listen to The English Hour, out of China.
You listen to music mostly or talk?
If a guy was into talk radio, is there a good bit of that?
There’s plenty of talk but not a lot of “call in and tell me why I’m right” formats. Think monologues. Sometimes it’s a few IQ points better than regular AM/FM but not always. There’s far less sports talk. There’s more religious talk. I think people who are more on the ball than me know the times and frequencies of their favorite programs. I just wing it. Also my radio picks up AM better than any radio I’ve ever had… after dark it’s not uncommon to hear AM from a long distance too.
I prefer music. The audio on SW isn’t great so I’m usually looking for something that interests me through novelty. Regional music I haven’t heard is fun. I also like rock and roll that’s really old or blues from France or something like that. Last campout was lots of classical but it didn’t bore me… either it was pretty good or I was in a receptive mood.
I used to like news from anywhere that’s not USA. It was a good reality check. Now I’m not sure if news anywhere on earth is actually news.
Thanks, that’s a helpful response.
A month ago I was hunting elk in the Sacramentos and had several days where the rest of my party left and I hunted solo. On the evening of 9/10, I got back to the truck well after dark and sat on the tailgate drowning my shitty hunting skills with a 12 pack. Driving back to camp, NPR had 9/11 remembrance show going and Part II of the Symphony of Sorrowful Songs by Henryk Gorecki https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zrYxBNziy24 played. I just idled the old Dodge back to camp sipping beer with this piece cranked on the radio.
A preface before listening to this song is that this piece was inspired by a quote found on the wall of a Gestapo prison. (From wikipedia: 18-year-old Helena Wanda Błażusiakówna, a highland woman incarcerated on 25 September 1944. It read O Mamo, nie płacz, nie. Niebios Przeczysta Królowo, Ty zawsze wspieraj mnie (Oh Mamma do not cry, no. Immaculate Queen of Heaven, you support me always).)
To borrow a quote “If I’d done nothing more this year than listen to that song, at that time, in that place… it would be a life lived well.”
My god, that was beautiful!