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I used to get the woodpecker, and some very ominous semi-continuous monotonous hums in human hearing ranges with occasional tweedle. And the lincolnshire poacher. Or, something very like it.

This was 70s Edinburgh, with a long-line antenna strung from my window to a tree about 50m away. I tried to make a dipole out of it, not sure it really worked. The radio was WW2 bomber surplus store, about 15U high and probably some precursor to a 19" rack width. you swapped out brick sized tuning blocks to reset it's frequency bands and then used a blade-overlap condenser tuner. I also used bakelite headphones, no soft foam. Hardcore! We had a better one downstairs with a vernier which tuned more accurately, consistently and it did MW for BBC radio. When FM became more common we got a small philips and it sat next to it, doing the hard work.

Shortwave picked up a lot. I was too young to understand what QSL cards would be about otherwise I would have some.




Wow, that would be a National HRO receiver. Quite capable radio.


I think it was a variant of what in the UK is called R1155E RAF Receiver 10D/1332

If not exactly that model, very similar.


>very ominous semi-continuous monotonous hums

could be buzzer perhaps https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UVB-76


Too modern. But similar intent perhaps


QSL cards (just looked it up) look like a fun hobby to send or receive, but probably moreso if you live somewhere remote or exotic (not me, I live in peak Dutch suburbia).




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