Taking a Radio Camping

Back in the 70s when shortwave was still king, we used to pack communications radios, rolls of antenna wire and jump on a train to travel up to northern Scandinavia to listen to faraway exotic stations on the medium and shortwave bands. It was an ideal environment with no electronic noise, mainly due to scarce population, and we were free to roll out 500 meters of longwire in various directions without upsetting anybody. Fun times indeed!

I occasionally get a long wire between buildings and listen to shortwave and bands. Sometime I’d like to get a HackRF and try out SDR and GNU Radio.

In the 90s I spent a few years working on the Jindalee Over-The-Horizon-Radar. It's in the HF band and located in a quiet spot in the middle of Australia. At that time it wasn't fully operational, so there were substantial periods where the research team had exclusive access. One of the techs was a keen radio amateur and used to patch his HF kit into the beamformed antenna array. Subject to the ionosphere not being complete rubbish he could roam around to his hearts content. A further bonus was real-time access to one of the world's best ionosonde networks. It was HF nirvana.

HackRF isn't the only way to go. There are other projects like T41-EP that can give you a really nice software defined platform as well.

Check it out here: https://www.4sqrp.com/T41main.php

(hint: you know it's a group of hams as soon as you see the colored fonts and grey background)

yeah you can also get an RTL-SDR for like $30 USD (or something) and listen to a pretty wide range of frequencies - definitely good enough to get started with a very small cost.

Not for shortwave. They don’t work below 50Mhz

Rtl-sdr blog v3 has a direct sampling mode that will get you into the single-digit mhz.

I assume that the v4 does as well. The earlier versions apparently also have this mode but it requires opening the devices up and a bit of soldering here and there.

I have an RTL-SDR and an upconverter. Pretty nice setup if you don't need the ability to transmit.

They do indeed, with the RTL-SDR Blog V3 and "direct sampling" mode! I think it's the only one at that price point that you can directly listen to HF/shortwave.

I have a couple of the super cheap ones I got for like $12 years back. With a simple mod you can get direct sampling and listen to any frequency. Works great.

The best radio for shortwave is without any doubt the Belka. It costs around 200€, but the quality is fantastic. The new versions cover also LW/MW and have an IQ output, so you can use as SDR as well. Otherwise you can find some Chinese clones of SDR play that are really cheap, but I am not suggesting those from a ethical standpoint