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Registered Member #162
Joined: Mon Feb 13 2006, 10:25AM
Location: United Kingdom
Posts: 3140
a common 'trick' for LW and MW radios with marginal reception is to build a multi-turn loop antenna with its own tuning capacitor when tuned to the same frequency as the radio, the radio antenna acts as a parasitic load on the large loop antenna. Should work even better at 60/77 kHz No need to hack the innards - warranty intact.
Registered Member #2099
Joined: Wed Apr 29 2009, 12:22AM
Location: Los Altos, California
Posts: 1714
In the springtime, in a Rite-Aid store to pick up some medicine, I happened to see and buy a radio-controlled clock for about $20, or was it $12? It's worked OK while being moved around a lot: outdoors at work for sundial project, then indoors with no WWVB reception, then home where it can turn on its radio receiver at 2 a.m. and get a time fix. The large LCD digits have a poor viewing angle, and it's easy to see faint activity in segments that are Off.
One day something was rattling around inside. Good excuse to open it up and check out the receiver and antenna. A tiny ferrite-rod loopstick antenna had broken free of its restraints, which were just a couple of dabs of hot-melt glue.
This is so cost-reduced, I stopped dreaming of tapping into a received bitstream or maybe finding a RSSI pin. The visible side of the board, with contact places for control-button pads, is literally printed -- I think there's no copper on that side of the board or in the vias.
It reliably fails to get a WWVB fix when told to search at mid-day. One of these days we'll dig out a big-loop antenna (as mentioned by Sulaiman) made for AM broadcast reception long ago. Then find a capacitor for it to resonate with at 60 kHz. Anyone know a good trick for adjusting the capacitor to match the radio station frequency of interest, if there's no noisy received audio to listen to?
The night-time radio reception seems to be undiminished since the antenna repair. This evening I captured a 15-second video showing a correction being applied. Here on You Tube:
Registered Member #96
Joined: Thu Feb 09 2006, 05:37PM
Location: CI, Earth
Posts: 4059
Yeah, the "Atomic" clock generated a fair few sales.
I discovered a way to pick up signals from glob chips, by painting onto the back of the board silver paint and then using a thin wire + Epoxy to make a capacitative contact. This hooked up to the gate on a sensitive JFET works very well, using 3*10M in series to mitigate static damage.
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