Hi Don.

I also enjoy medium wave DXing.  I cannot speak about the Kenwood R-5000,
having never owned one, but I can make some other recommendations for good
medium wave receivers.  I have found the Drake R-8A to be a good choice for
medium wave listening.  It is sensitive, and the I-F filtering is very
flexible.  It is not as blind-friendly as some receivers (it doesn't take a
speech board), but the quality of the receiver is excellent.  The Icom
R-71A is also quite good for medium wave reception, although the I F
filtering is not as nice as the Drake.  Also, the Drake has synchronous
detection which is worth its weight in gold when selective fading is occurring.

As for HF transceivers, I've had a few.  Most of the HF transceivers roll
the sensitivity back to maintain good intermod characteristics on 160
meters, so you will hear a pronounced drop in receiver sensitivity when you
drop below 1700 kHz.  In spite of this, some receivers still manage to do a
good job down there.  Of particular note would be the Icom IC-735, and the
Icom IC-751 and 751A.  There are probably other Icom radios that do a good
job in this region of
  frequencies, but I haven't used them, so I cannot say how good or bad
they are.  The Kenwood TS-440S is fair, but not as good as the Icom
radios.  It has a very prominent birdie at 900 kHz that takes out any
signal that you might listen to there.  Also, the receiver noise floor
seems higher.  I actually like the TS-440S better than I do the Kenwood
TS-450S and the TS-690S, though.  These receivers, while flexible in the
I-F filtering department, do not have really good strong signal handling
characteristics, and the receivers really fall apart at the low end of the
broadcast band, making them pretty useless for longwave reception.  The
Icom transceivers that I mentioned, as well as the Drake and the Icom R71A
are good down to at least 100 kHz.

One transceiver to avoid is the Icom IC-706 series radios.  While these
radios are fairly good on HF and fair on VHF, they are too inflexible for
good medium wave work, and they roll off the sensitivity way too much for
the MW and LW bands.

If you are going to look at older solid state receivers, the Kenwood R-1000
was much better for medium wave work than the R-2000.  The R-1000 had
better sensitivity, and with a small modification which is detailed in the
Kenwood Owner's manual, you could set the R-1000 to use the 6 kHz I F
filter for the AM Wide setting, and the 2.7 kHz filter for the AM narrow
filter.  The stock setup was 12 kHz for AM Wide, and 6kHz for AM
Narrow.  You can make a Kenwood R-2000 work for medium wave reception, but
for best results, you should run some kind of receiver preselector in front
of the receiver.  The R-2000 suffered from lack of tuned circuitry in the
receiver front end, and tended to have lots of intermod problems below 2
MHz.  I used the Grove Enterprises TUN-3 Receiver Preselector with good
results.  Incidentally, if you ever see one of these preselectors at a
hamfest and the price is reasonable, pick it up.  These preselectors are a
gem for just about any kind of SWL work, as they will often take a receiver
with a poor front end and make it usable.  I found mine on a flea market
table at the Rochester hamfest for $15, and I couldn't get my wallet out
fast enough!

Be careful about some of the DC to daylight receivers--they are rarely good
for medium wave work.  Specifically, I am speaking about receivers like the
Icom R-100, which although intriguing for VHF and UHF work, stunk on ice
for medium wave and HF work.


The real key for selecting a good general coverage receiver for medium wave
DX-ing is to look at three things--good front-end selectivity, good overall
sensitivity and dynamic range, and flexible IF filtering arrangements.

Hope that this helps.

73, de Lou K2LKK


At 04:28 PM 6/6/2003 -0700, you wrote:
>Hi,
>
>
>The following probably seems like a weird question for a ham list.
>However, I want to buy either a general coverage receiver or an HF
>ham transceiver which excels at medium wave reception.
>
>I remember reading in Popcom that many general coverage receivers do
>not do well at medium wave reception because the circuitry is
>optimized for bands above 5 megs.
>
>So I am writing to request recommendations for receivers which excel
>at a.m. broadcast band reception but which also do wwell on the
>higher bands as well.  While I am asking the question, how well do
>the Kenwood 440, 450, and R-5000 do in this area.
>
>If no reasonably priced general coverage receiver does well at this,
>then I might as well just get a G E super 3 or perhaps the CC radio.
>
>Thanks for any feedback.
>
>Don Roberts
>K A 7 O J T
>
>
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Louis Kim Kline
A.R.S. K2LKK
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