Wednesday, August 30, 2006

Partly interesting conditions - testing IC-7000

Early autumn is a good time for catches from DU - European and Asian stations aren't that strong and I am far enough east of central Europe to take advantage of European daylight. A few nice ones, monitored to and from between1630-1800:
729 ABC RN, Adelaide
891 ABC Adelaide (tentative, but the DU intonation gave it away)
1161 ABC Southeast, Naracoorte. New! Have been hunting this one for several years, incidentally the first proper logging on my new IC-7000!
1620 4KZ tentative, didn't wait for an ID - no other x-band stations audible.
Also heard traces of 1548 Emerald and possibly 774 Wellington.

Unfortunately very poor at night, only a few weak TA stations audible, none from North America. More interesting conditions in southern Norway.

This evening and night was the first real test for the IC-7000. There are good points, but at least one bad point as well: The audio from the external speaker jack and headphone jack is very hissy. Seems like the hiss is in the 5-6 kHz area. It is in fact annoying. Much to my surprise though, the line-out does NOT contain hiss. I connected my ELPAF filter to the audio output and that cured the hiss problem. That done, it is evident that the receiver itself is in fact very quiet, even compared to the 746Pros. I had the pleasure of comparing audio quality of 4KZ-1620 when it was mainly at or below threshold level. The IC-7000 matched, and partly surpassed, the IC-746Pro. I got the same impression during the night with massive interference from EU stations.

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