I'm glad to hear that you are enjoying yours!

Thanks Ali, I think that is what makes the difference here!

Hi Taseen, my pleasure! I really enjoy catching these distant MW signals, always fun to find something new.

I can catch Kuwait radio from Jordan, destance around 1200 km Have a good time Andrea

@user-bk7od1bh4z سلام عليكم هنا بالأردن نلتقط إذاعة الكويت، صراحة من أجمل الاذاعات تحياتنا لكم

@@eyadabusharar2457 مشكور اخي لفاضل، هذا من طيب اصلك

@@eyadabusharar2457 Thank you for your comment Eyad!

Hey Matt, might be LED lighting indeed, somewhere outside. As usual the electricity in my house was switched off while I made the video. But it's interesting that there is much less noise on the Qodosen.

@@swlistening It does seem very quiet when the electricity is switched off. It’s the same here the electric box creates so much noise in itself let alone the rest of the things in the house!

​@@MattinLaplandI concur. In a typical suburban residence environment, it's very difficult to totally eliminate RFI even though your own house's mains are turned off. A neighborhood-wide electrical blackout will help in Andre's case but then again, it's common for Johannesburg residents to switch to their backup generators and battery powered power banks. 😐

Hi Wayne, this might explain why some of these PR-D4W's are so noisy also. I find mine a bit noisy on MW. But I am fairly happy with its sensitivity, I think it does quite well in catching distant and weak signals. It's just the noise that bothers me. In the same room, at the same time, exact same spot, the PR-D4W is more noisy than, for example, the Qodosen DX-286 and also my analogue Sony ICF-J40. Mine also works very well when paired with the Tecsun AN-200 passive loop, which I think is basically the same as the TERK. I haven't really tried mine on FM very much yet, so I can't really comment about that. It's very good on my local FM signals though, the stations I listen to regularly.

Hi Paulo, it probably is RFI, but must be from the neighbours. I always switch off the electricity mains in my house when I DX. So no chargers or laptops in my own house. It's interesting though that the noise is not present on the Qodosen, same time, same place.

@@swlistening Yep, I noticed that the main "buzz" was made up mainly of 50Hz, 100Hz, 150Hz,....up to 400Hz. This is a tell-tale sign of mains RFI. Of course there is other wideband noise present but the very distracting "buzz" is as described above. You should seriously consider making even simple audio notch filter/s just using inductors and capacitors. These can then be wired on the audio output from your radios. Not as effective as DSP but still make a big difference and are simple and cheap to make and require no knowledge of software or programming. Will send you a before and after recording using only notch filters and you will hear the difference they make.

@@swlistening Andre, in your spare time could you try hooking up both the Q and the Sangean to your MLA-30+ for medium wave? After all, the Megaloop is rated for receiving signals from 500 kHz to 30 MHz and that includes the MW band. 🙂

@@StratmanII I will do this, it will be an interesting idea. I'm making a note to help me remember.

@@StratmanII Oh, but as I pressed send I remembered, the Sangean does not have an input for an external antenna... And I can't connect the M:A30+ to the Sangean whip either, because you can't switch to the whip as you can with the Qodosen. So I won't be able to do this comparison. Would have been interesting.

Thanks Alain! I think you are right about the bandwidth on the Qodosen, someone else actually commented on exactly the same thing (on another video) last night. He said he thinks the bandwidth setting on the TEF6686 radios actually appears to be correct. I remember some time ago I read an article about bandwidth settings on portable radios with the Silicon Labs chips, the writer said that the bandwidth settings appear to be wider than they actually are. For example, if it says 5 kHz, the actual bandwidth is 2.5 kHz. I don't know where I saw that, just remembered it now. Might be. I think it is definitely true that the bandwidth on the Qodosen is not the same as on many other radios. If the Qodosen says 3 kHz and the Sangean says 3 kHz, they sound different.

@@swlistening this is quite tricky, but you have to distinguish between audio bandwidth and IF bandwidth. IF bandwidth will always be 2x wider than respective audio bandwidth as you have an AM signal with two sidebands, and assuming you're precisely tuned to that signal and the IF filter is symmetrical (it should be with DSP 😛 while older analogue receivers & transceivers may have a thing called Passband Tuning, which actually shifts the IF filter either to get a bit more high-pitch audio response or tube away from some interference). So "5 kHz" filter on the radio can mean both actual audio width of 5 kHz and 5 kHz IF, i.e. 2.5 kHz audio. It depends on the radio, there's no standardization to it 🙄

@@ArnieDXer Thanks Arnie, that explains why the bandwidth sounds different on some radios sometimes, even though the settings appear to be the same.

I agree. It is very sensitive.

@@swlistening Here's the tricky thing about a receiver's sensitivity: one that is picking up the faint signals is also picking up electrical noise and static, because the latter is perceived as a "signal" to the radio. The only way to enjoy both high sensitivity and noise rejection is to insert an efficient noise blanking (NB) and/or noise reduction system (NR) into the circuit. NB and NR work differently from one another - the TEF6686 DSP has a Noise Blanker but not a Noise Reduction system. A Noise Blanker prevents spurious, intermittent noises from thunderstorm lightning, pulsed electrified security fences, power lines and spark plug cable from interfering with a radio station. 🙂 Noise Reduction on the other hand, suppresses the static; making the foreground audio more distinct from the background hiss (static). The Malachite SDR's NR system works quite well that shortwave listening experience seems unnaturally surreal. In my experience driving in city traffic, old two stroke engine motorycles were the worst offenders when it comes to RFI at the robots, bru. 🚦😀

@@StratmanII This is very true. I guess that's why the Sangean is so noisy.

@@StratmanII this should explain why my TEF6686 had been pulling a little bit of more audio from Kossuth Radio on 540 kHz than my SDR vs massive thunderstorm noise 🤨

Big difference indeed! Only my Kenwood R1000 has a noise blanker, and it works really well. Cuts out the eletric fence noise that I sometimes hear on other radios. The built-in nose blanker on the Qodosen seems to work well, it's not the first time that I've noticed this difference between the Sangean and the Qodosen. I want to take both the Sangean and the Qodosen to the park some time and try there, but the next two weeks will be busy for me, I have a big work project to complete. Will see after that, maybe a nice park expedition again! To see how the Sangean performs where there is less noise.

If I'm not mistaken, Noise Blankers have a different effect compared to Noise Reduction. Andre's Kenwood R-1000 uses an early NB technology and it's sometimes mistaken for NR. 🤔

@@swlistening guess what, thanks to your videos I felt inspired to go out with my TEF6686 tuner and a passive loop 😅 and I was really surprised by how sensitive this radio actually is, at least on FM! With that loop, perhaps it's a bit oversized for FM band, but with it hanging just about one meter above the ground, I managed to get an RDS decode of a 120kW station on the other side of Poland, some 470km away 😱 it propagated via air scatter, i.e. bounced off an airplane or warmed-up trails it leaves around mid-way between me and the transmitter. Actually a lot of my FM DX is made through aircraft scatter like this, but with my Airspy HF+ Discovery, imagine, I need a 3-element antenna to observe the effect just as strongly as the TEF got it just with that single loop! 😱 Still though, my main idea was to check if I could get Romania on MW via pure groundwave during their football team's match against Ukraine in Euro 2024. It was there, but barely audible on 603 kHz, a little bit better but gone later on 756. Distances there were in the 600-700km+ area. Hardly any different from the big loop and the SDR. Nevertheless, I was happy to hear the same match on Radio Romania International on 11950 kHz SW loud & clear 🙂

@@ArnieDXer Your talk of FM DXing and how it works makes me really curious to try this out. Is it a bit of luck, or do you know when to listen out for which signals? 470 km is quite something for FM. As you know, I haven't really delved into FM DXing, but I know many FM DXer really like the TEF6686 chip radios for their FM DXing. Glad that you still managed to catch your football match 🙂

@@swlistening actually, there's more than you think that plays its part in FM DXing 😜 There are so many propagation modes that work on FM (and VHF in general). I love air scatter because it can give you a short & pretty focused opening to a certain distant area, which then moves as the plane moves. And since there are so many planes flying above us, opportunities are aplenty 🤓 Then there is Tropo. Tropo is highly dependent on weather: large areas of high pressure, temperature inversion or a thunderstorm can all produce a Tropo ducting, which gives you stronger, a lot more steady signals from more areas at once than air scatter. It can really fill in the band, even with low-power stations, which is not so certain with air scatter. Also distances covered can be larger. You can continue listening to your favourite local station while you drive away from your city - and still have good reception some 150km, 200km, or further away 😃 And then there is Sporadic-E, which is ionospheric a bit like shortwave. The differences are that Sporadic-E is a lot less stable (signals typically fade up & down constantly), openings last for limited time (minutes, hours), tend to be more or less tightly focused on a specific geographical area or even a specific town - and it's a seasonal thing. Here in the northern hemisphere, Es is usually confined to May-August, with some openings maybe around New Year, coinciding with a peak on southern hemisphere. And then there is also Meteor Scatter, but that usually gives you anything from a fraction of a second to a few seconds of reception... All things considered, FM DX can make you busy for much of the year, although you need to observe the band regularly and be patient. And do equip yourself with an external antenna 🥸 Hope this helps.

To be honest, I am a bit surprised by the noise on the Sangean. It has a very strong following among hardcore MW DXers and is rated very highly for MW DXing on many MW DXing forums. I am thinking that it might perform better outdoors, very far away from RFI. I will try that some time. I can see that it is, indeed, very sensitive, it's just the noise that is bothersome. Some other people have also pointed out in comments that they experience noise on theirs. As a MW radio I think this Sangean is one of the better ones in the market, it has bandwidth settings, and a very thick 5 inch ferrite antenna. It was definitely purposively designed for MW listening also, not just FM. I agree about the Qodosen though, it is newer (the Sangean is ten years old already, was released in 2014 or 2015) and quieter, with better noise blanking. It is definitely more of a niche product for DXers, where the Sangean, as you say, was made for the mass market, I think for the US in particular. It pick up strong signals really well, so I think as a desktop daily listening radio, if you live in the US, it is great. There are still many MW stations there. The MW DXing came later when DXers discovered how sensitive it is. Just the noise issue...

@@swlistening Ah, words of wisdom from my favourite SWL content creator! 🙇 🏆 I learned something new today and I thank you for it. I did not know the PR-D4W was also designed to be a MW powerhouse; it looks like some other kitchen or bedside AM/FM radio to me! 😀 I also had no idea you bought the PR-D4W as a medium wave DX'ing machine. It's not the C Crane EP Pro with the twin ferrite cores and was wondering why you would buy some random Sangean model that wasn't from the ATS-909 or ATS-505 family. 😁 I agree that Sangean will have a large market in North America, the continent that's still full of AM radio stations. Oddly, Japan is still operating MW radio stations (I confirmed this with my Tecsun PL-398 on my last visit to Tokyo, lol) while Southeast Asian countries have largely migrated to FM and/or DAB+. One thing that the FM transmission medium can't claim to fame is that its signal can't travel 1,600 kms from Kuwait to South Africa! 🌍 Comparing the PR-D4W which was released in the year 2015 with a TEF6686 equipped DX-286 designed in 2024 has a rather interesting, yet predictable outcome. 📻👍😀

@@StratmanII I guess the outcome was predictable, yes 🙂 Sangean has two radios that MW DXers like, the PR-D4W, and the PR-D5, later becoming the PR-D15. The PR-D5 has an 8 inch internal ferrite antenna! I was deciding between these two when I got the PR-D4W, they get similar reviews and feedback. In the end I got the PR-D4W because it was somewhat cheaper than the PR-D5. Interesting that MW is still big in Japan. I think maybe in China also? There seem to be a lot of Chinese stations listed on MW listing sites. It is also still huge in South America, Argentina and Chile are two examples. There are still MW listeners around the world 📻🥳

@@swlistening _"Interesting that MW is still big in Japan"_ 🗾🇯🇵 Hehe... I can't resist smiling at your unintended reference to the German synth band, Alphaville's hit song from 1984! 😀 Lots of other things are also big in Japan, Andre! 🙂 Thank goodness for the Chinese, bru. They're still into radios to this day, as evidenced by: a) the numerous domestic brands that we've never heard of - not including Tecsun, XHDATA, Degen, Retekess, HanRongDa, Kaide, etc. b) widespread advertising of "radios for the elderly". Who advertises radios like that?👴👵📻 c) many models that have Chinese characters printed on the buttons and controls, like your ICR-110. d) the proliferation of SW transmitters for CNR, CRI and CGTN Radio domestic and international broadcasts I wish medium wave stations were still omnipresent at my QTH. It's a shame that FM and SW are the only bands my radios can receive. I don't think buying a C Crane EP Pro will help either. 😞

@@StratmanII Now that you mention it, "Big in Japan", I remember the song very well! I like that song. I like Alphaville in general. You are so right about the massive radio market in China, it is actually really great. I often see some weird and unknown Chinese radios on Ali Express. And those "elderly" radios, they must be very popular, because I see them a lot 🙂 Thanks to China, I think, we will always have SW, they are keeping the SW band alive for us DXers. The very strong CRI and CNR1 signals can be irritating when they bleed into neighbouring frequencies or just obliterate weak signals on the same frequency. But I love catching the weaker Chinese signals in Tibetan and Mongolian and Uyghur and Kazakh, some interesting catches to make there.

Tell me the frequencies Eyad, then I will try :-)

Its 612