Paisa DXing

See the link on the left for some sample SDR Files and audio wav recordings.

I spent March 12 to 20 visiting the Medellin, Colombia area with my daughter, a first year university student (minoring in Spanish). We spent the nights of March 12 & 13 (Friday/Saturday) and March 16 to 19 (Tuesday to Friday) in the Poblado district of Medellin at the Waypoint Hostel. Medellin is a large city with a very crowded MW dial, but I made a number of SDR-IQ recordings using a short length of wire thrown out the window onto the roof of the kitchen. Mostly this was just to get a good flavor of the local radio scene as I didn't expect much in the way of DX. Mostly I made recordings running the laptop on battery power in order to reduce the noise level.

On Sunday we journeyed three hours east of Medellin to the Rio Claro Nature Refuge, which is about 40 km west of the city of Puerto Truinfo. We stayed there on March 14 and 15 (Sunday/Monday). The hotel is a complex of 24 small cabins just off the highway. This is a rural area in the hot humid lowlands of the Magdalena River Valley. There are no nearby radio stations, but the cabins were noisier than I would have liked. MW was mostly fine as long as I ran the laptop on battery power. Longwave was totally useless. Shortwave, on the other hand, was mostly noisefree even when running on AC.

It was the off-season, there were very few guests, and our cabin was on the edge of the complex, so I was able to run a 160 meter unterminated BOG (beverage on the ground) pointed more-or-less north. The Rio Claro BOG started at the tree line behind the cabin and then ran north behind the cabins. There was a very steep hill immediately to the left (west) which probably blocked signals from that direction. The cabin complex was to the right.

The BOG then continued along the tree line beside this storage area, finally running about 10 meters into the forest along the river.

Monday afternoon I ran a second 20 meter wire out the window and through a few trees up the hillside behind our cabin. It performed better than the BOG, so I did all the Monday night/Tuesday morning recording on it. The next morning when I wound in the BOG I found out why the BOG had seemed worse on day two - it had been cut in two places and tied back together. Obviously the guy with the weed-whacker who I had seen working at the other end of the complex Monday afternoon. I give him credit for at least tying the wire back together.