Sangean ATS-909X FM DXing Test

To examine the FM receiving capabilities of my new Sangean ATS-909X portable shortwave radio, I drove to a hill approx. 5 km South of my home town. From the North side of the hill, one has a good view to West and North.

Reception of local and semi-local stations is very good (as one may expect from a 200 € radio), and the RDS information is decoded quickly if the signal is strong enough.

So I chose a couple of rather distant stations to see how reception and RDS are working. There were no enhanced propagation conditions that day, neither Tropo nor Sporadic-E. I assume the scatter reception from Denmark was caused by reflection on an airplane.

Time: around 1800 UTC on 20 May 2011

Location: a hill 20 km Southeast of Hannover, Germany

Stations received:
88.3 MHz Nordwestradio, Bremen, 100 kW, 125 km away
89.2 MHz NDR 2, Osnabrueck, 8 kW, 129 km away
88.1 MHz Radio Hochstift, near Paderborn, 4 kW, 89 km away
95.1 MHz Danmarks Radio P1, Rangstrup, 60 kW, 328 km away

RDS only appeared on 89.2 MHz (barely visible because the video quality suffered from the upload/transcoding).

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• sangean
• ats-909x
• fm
• vhf
• ukw
• reception
• empfang
• dx
• dxing

[Luc1f3rk0]

Try the selectivity with strong local stations! My ATS-909 can be overloaded by near transmitter .(

[senderjaeger]

@Luc1f3rk0 In this video, I'm mainly testing the sensitivity. Maybe I'll take another one showing the selectivity, but for that I need tropo conditions because the local stations in my area are usually at least 200 or 300 kHz apart.

By the way, strong local transmitters also cause some ghost signals on the 909X (250 kHz below or above the actual frequency).

[antennebuis]

Matthias ,a nice radio .But no connection for extern FM antenna ? Compare this radio with you AOR7030  .Im cureous about the sensitivity

73,

Maurits

[senderjaeger]

@antennebuis Hi! No, it hasn't got an external antenna input for FM. The connection is for LW/MW/SW only. One can't compare this radio with the AOR. It's a portable for the average SW listener while the AR7030 is a high-performance receiver built for advanced DX enthusiasts.

73, Matthias

[antennebuis]

@senderjaeger Thanks for you respons Matthias ,the 909X sonds very clear .And the DSP ?

[senderjaeger]

@antennebuis Yes, the 909X sounds very good and clear. The DSP is OK for average FM radio listening, but when signals are very weak and fading, it is inferior to analog tuners because the signals appear and disappear abruptly instead of fading in and out softly.

73, Matthias

[antennebuis]

@senderjaeger OK Matthias  thanks for the info

73,

Maurits

[senderjaeger]

@superarticulation I'm looking out for Sporadic-E regularly, and I'm uploading videos of it as you can see on my channel. ;-) I already had some good catches this season.

[superarticulation]

@senderjaeger Try it in this season. You may gain a lot. Later in Autumn, there will be no efficient Sporadic-E

[senderjaeger]

@superarticulation That's really nice, congrats on that distance! I know that phenomenon very well, it's called "Sporadic-E", and it's extremely fascinating. On the day I took this video, there weren't such unusual atmospheric conditions, however. My goal was testing the radio's FM and RDS sensitivity under "normal" conditions anyway. Thanks for watching and feedback!