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Realistic DX-160

Nightshade

Nightshade

Member
Sep 16, 2009
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I hope to be able to buy a decent REALISTIC DX-160 off e-bay soon. I'm just getting back into SWL and at my age (63) I still like the old hands on way of doing things so this analog radio is perfect to play with.

Since I am retired the budget is razor thin for play toys so I like to use what I already have when I can. That said, I have a set of TV rabbit ears that I'd like to try as a antenna for my first attempt "if" I score a DX-160. So my question is pretty basic......Will TV rabbit ears work as SW antenna?

Any help will be appreciated. :D
 

Nope on the rabbit ears. Those are for VHF 50mhz & up. Will be absolutely deaf. All you need is a long piece of wire. Heck 50 feet will do. Any wire....small gauge wire is fine. Run it outside and up in a tree. Doesn't matter for SWL if wire is touching tree branches ect...Just get a piece of wore outside and up in the air a little bit, you'll do fine.

Good luck!
 
nightshade,

do an internet search for "inverted L antenna".

this is a great basic antenna for SWLing, as its easy to put up, and is basically omnidirectional.

here's how i did the one i had up a few years ago.

i too used a DX-160 (great radio btw!) and was able to hear so many stations it was hard to decide what to listen to.

i used a piece of wire about 100' long.

i tied one end to a tree about 25 feet up, and strung it across my yard to another tree, securing it at the same height, i then ran the rest of the wire down the tree to the ground.

if you picture this, it looks like an upside down "L".

pound a ground rod into the ground at the base of the tree with the wire coming down, and attach the center wire of a length of coax to the wire, then attach the shield of the coax to the ground rod.

makes a great antenna.

if you're not one for climbing trees, then take a look at a "broomstick antenna".

this antenna can even be used in the house, but will work better up on your roof.

get yourself a wooden broomstick or other wooden dowel about 4 feet long.

run a length of double sided tape up the side of the broomstick.

now take a 100' roll of insulated wire and beginning at the bottom, wrap the wire neatly all the way up the broomstick. keep each turn right next to the previous one.

when you get to the top, pull out about 4-6" of wire and cut off the excess.

now get yourself an aluminum pizza dish/pie plate.
drill a hole right in the middle of it, big enough for a screw, and screw it to the top of the broomstick.
strip the wire that you wound up the broomstick and wrap it around the screw before tightening it all the way.
tighten the screw so that you have a good solid connection from the wire to the pie plate.

at the bottom of the broomstick, just leave enough wire to get from the antenna to your radio, and attach the wire to your radio.

this antenna also works surprisingly well.

good luck,
LC
 
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Thanks for the reply's fellas. (y)

Loosecannon.. what kind of wire & gage? Copper or stainless or? And the wire gage??

The broomstick looks interesting since I can't climb trees or do ladders anymore. (I'l bribe the neighbor's boys for that. :D) What gage of wire and unless I miss my guess I'll need copper for that job. No?

Oh yes there is a fella on e-bay selling brass "slinkies" for antennas. Any thoughts on them?
 
Nightshade said:
Thanks for the reply's fellas. (y)

Loosecannon.. what kind of wire & gage? Copper or stainless or? And the wire gage??

The broomstick looks interesting since I can't climb trees or do ladders anymore. (I'l bribe the neighbor's boys for that. :D) What gage of wire and unless I miss my guess I'll need copper for that job. No?

Oh yes there is a fella on e-bay selling brass "slinkies" for antennas. Any thoughts on them?
Click to expand...

Forget the slinky. Use copper wire. This is a receiving antenna so wire size doesn't matter. You don't want it so heavy it bends the trees over and crushes the house, but you don't want it so light that a breeze breaks it. AWG 18-22 will do just fine in most cases.

When I first got into SWLing, before I got my ham license, I just ran a piece of #22 bell wire kittycorner across my bedroom ceiling and dropped it down to my SX-99. The world immediately poured forth from the speaker and I was hooked. Radio Moscow! Radio Sofia (Bulgaria)! HCJB (Quito, Ecuador)! NHK (Tokyo)! Radio Australia!

Sadly, many of these are no longer on the air; the Internet is a more efficient way of communicating with the world, but some are still there.

Have fun!
 
Beetle said:
When I first got into SWLing, before I got my ham license, I just ran a piece of #22 bell wire kittycorner across my bedroom ceiling and dropped it down to my SX-99. The world immediately poured forth from the speaker and I was hooked. Radio Moscow! Radio Sofia (Bulgaria)! HCJB (Quito, Ecuador)! NHK (Tokyo)! Radio Australia!
Click to expand...

WOW!!! Can it be THAT simple! :w00t: :w00t: :w00t:
 
Nightshade said:
WOW!!! Can it be THAT simple! :w00t: :w00t: :w00t:
Click to expand...

Well - I should add that this was in 1957-1958, which was the time of the biggest sunspot peak that anybody now alive has ever experienced. Right now, radio propagation is NOT anybody's friend. Still, the DX-160 is a decent receiver - not quite on a par with my old SX-99, but it should work well for you. You might want somewhat more wire, up higher, than my ceiling job was.
 
I owned a couple of those over the years, as well as a DX-150. The 160 was a lot better above 15 MHz than the 150 (which was nearly deaf on the higher bands). I still have a card file box full of QSL cards from 1974-1981 from my DX-160. Some used them as budget novice ham receivers and they would work for that but mostly what that would do was point out the need for a better receiver.

For SWBC work they did well, and once you got used to where everything was on a particular band you could tell what freq you were on-- for example, I had log scale I had sketched out for the 31 and 49 meter bands so that if I lined up the main dial and bandspread just so... A lot of folks did this with analog general coverage receivers.

I hope the one you get still has its capacitors in good shape and is still in good alignment. Those receivers are long in the tooth now. Are you getting the matching speaker?


Rick
 
DX-160 hey? Now there is a flashback. My first SW RX was a DX-160. I used that for several years before getting a Kenwood R-1000 which I still have. The old DX-160 allowed me to hear many places around the world that I have not since heard due to propagation or discontinuance of service to various target areas. My first AM broadcast DX from Europe was on the DX-160 as well as my first medium wave DX from the Middle East. I still remember freaking out when hearing Arabic (actually Persian) on 765 KHz and learning that it was from a 2 Megawatt tx in Chabahbar Iran. (y)
 
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RickC. said:
I hope the one you get still has its capacitors in good shape and is still in good alignment. Those receivers are long in the tooth now. Are you getting the matching speaker?


Rick
Click to expand...

Yes, I know that the DX-160 is now VERY long in the tooth today!! It's really a gamble that I have to take due to my razor thin budget. As to the speaker..... I won't buy one without the speaker.
 
Was my first receiver as well.

Copying Morse on that thing was a true PITA, as you had to let it stabilize long enough to stay tuned to a station you wanted to decode and you still needed to keep a steady hand on the bandspread knob. SSB/CW selectivity? Riiiight...but I built a multi-section outboard audio filter and away I went.

Antennas used here were a variety of inverted L random wires, each fed into a homebrew switchbox/preselector combo.

As in the case of other posters, the rig resulted in a shoebox full of SWBC QSLs.

Most memorable DX was on 29.750 - Kol Yisrael - low power and at the high end of the tuning range, a hard catch to make. Back in the day, it seemed every shortwave broadcaster ran at least 50kW - and many ran MUCH more - so "catching" anything above, say, 7MHz was really akin to shooting fish in a barrel. Since many broadcasters who used the 11M (25.5-26.1) and 10M (29.71-29.9) SW bands ran relatively low power, you had to have a decent setup to copy them - but sunspots helped.

DXing the 120M and 90M bands were a different story altogether. I wish I had had an R7 and/or a Mackay Marine 3031A back in those days...
 
I remember when R/S discontinued the DX-160. It was in 1979 or 1980 maybe. $99.95 or something. I wanted to mount one in my '77 toyota landcruiser. I passed up many at hamfests in the '80's. I finally bought one about 10 years ago. Not nearly as nice as the ones I passed up. Such a great looker.
 

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