Comment by Johnny555 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Johnny555 | Hacker News Reader

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This wasn't written for a technical audience (or they wouldn't have had to explain what each band was), "everyone" knows what AM and FM radio are, and few know (or care) that they are modulation modes.

Medium Wave and Long Wave bands are not "quaint". Those are the international designations for those particular wave bands.

Why can't they be both "quaint" and international designations?

The wikipedia description of a "preselector" sounds close to what they described:

A preselector typically is tuned to have a narrow bandwidth, centered on the receiver’s operating frequency. The preselector passes through the signal on the frequency it is tuned to unchanged, or only slightly diminished, but it reduces or removes off-frequency signals, cutting down or eliminating unwanted interference. However, a preselector does not remove interference on the same frequency that it and the receiver are both tuned to.

"Hams on various Internet message boards argue about the relative technical merits"...No they don't. This is not a specialised Ham Receiver. It was specifically designed for Short-Wave Listeners.

Are you sure they don't? Are you claiming that there's no overlap between hams and shortwave listeners? Here's one:

https://www.eham.net/reviews/detail/526

Several of the commenters have their ham call-sign as their userid. So if there's just one more message board where hams discuss the unit, this statement can be marked true.

> This wasn't written for a technical audience (or they wouldn't have had to explain what each band was), "everyone" knows what AM and FM radio are, and few know (or care) that they are modulation modes.

Aiming at non-technical audience means you need to make things simpler, not wrong.

Also, since when non-technical people hang out at ieee.org?

Maybe, the ones who have typed "Grundig Radio" in the browser's search box?

> This wasn't written for a technical audience (or they wouldn't have had to explain what each band was)...

The article appeared in the monthly magazine of IEEE, the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers, so the audience is not completely non-technical.

However, having seen IEEE's decline first-hand over the past 25 years, they are clearly dumbing things down a bit to cater for all types of audiences, including non-EEs. Even their website now just uses the slogan "The world's largest technical professional organization for the advancement of technology", and many of its articles now fall into the styles of those of retail science magazines.

For practical electronics engineering and implementation, things like Bunnie Huang's blog and documentation of things like the Novena "laptop" have far surpassed traditional publications like the IEEE Spectrum.

Shortwave listening used to be the gateway drug for many hams. That's the reason for the apparent overlap.

Receivers of this type are pretty useless on the ham bands. You can't even connect a proper antenna to it (technically you can, but the unit would struggle with overload issues).

73s, dg3mg

>So if there's just one more message board where hams discuss the unit....

You can find exceptions to any absolute statement (including this one), that doesn't mean that all absolute statements are wrong.

Humans will talk about anything and everything. Try and think of something that would never come up on HN, and then search for it on the search bar. 'My little Pony' returns a surprising number of results.

> This wasn't written for a technical audience (or they wouldn't have had to explain what each band was), "everyone" knows what AM and FM radio are, and few know (or care) that they are modulation modes.

I think it's worth pointing out that the difference between AM and FM being modulation is right in their respective names: Amplitude or Frequency Modulation. It's very descriptive - not exactly rocket science.

> The wikipedia description of a "preselector" sounds close to what they described:

It's also the description of a tuned RF stage, which any decent radio has. Except for cheap ones which make you manually tune it, and call that a "feature".

And read again what I said about the main IF filter. That's the one which removes adjacent stations.

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