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What an idiotic article! Almost every paragraph has multiple technical errors of a fundamental nature. " ... but it was equally capable with AM (about 510 to

What an idiotic article! Almost every paragraph has multiple technical errors of a fundamental nature. " ... but it was equally capable with AM (about 510 to 1620 kilohertz, which was referred to as “medium wave” in olden times), and the spectrum below that once quaintly known as long wave (148 to 420 kHz), and also FM." AM and FM are modulation modes, not frequency bands. For example, most shortwave stations also transmit in AM. And on course FM is used in many places besides the VHF Broadcast band. The Medium Wave and Long Wave bands are not "quaint". Those are the international designations for those particular wave bands. "The preselector is a mechanism for filtering out frequencies that are closely adjacent to the frequency the operator selects, minimizing the potential interference from other signals on those nearby frequencies". Completely wrong. Close in stations are removed by the main IF filter. A Preselector is a manually tuned RF stage which is intended to remove Image frequencies and other spurious responses. And to say that a Preselector is "rare, possibly even unique" is utter nonsense. Good quality radios have an automatically tuned RF stage, it's only in cheap radios that a manual control substituted. And it's a Band-Pass-Filter, not a Low-Pass-Filter. "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. I could go on.

Johnny555 8y ago
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 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.
- jnord 8y ago
  > 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.
  - walrus01 8y ago
    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.
- Johnythree 8y ago
  > 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.
- urubu 8y ago
  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
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  > 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?
madengr 8y ago
Yep, the best receiver ever built is probably in the Flex 6000 series with the band filters. I have one, and it has insane amount of dynamic range, which is good as I have an AM station a few miles away. http://www.sherweng.com/table.html http://www.sherweng.com/table.html
Koshkin 8y ago
To be fair, consumer radios do use "AM" to label the medium wave band, so it de facto has dual meaning (regardless of the origin). It is unfortunate, but this kind of "misuse" of special terminology is rather widespread: for example we all often say "atomic" when we mean "nuclear." I agree that it is important for a general audience to be aware of the high-school physics, but to call an article idiotic for not insisting on it is not fair.

Johnny555 8y ago

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 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.

jnord 8y ago
> 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.
- walrus01 8y ago
  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.
Johnythree 8y ago
> 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.
urubu 8y ago
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
TeMPOraL 8y ago
> 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?

madengr 8y ago

Yep, the best receiver ever built is probably in the Flex 6000 series with the band filters. I have one, and it has insane amount of dynamic range, which is good as I have an AM station a few miles away. http://www.sherweng.com/table.html http://www.sherweng.com/table.html

Koshkin 8y ago

To be fair, consumer radios do use "AM" to label the medium wave band, so it de facto has dual meaning (regardless of the origin). It is unfortunate, but this kind of "misuse" of special terminology is rather widespread: for example we all often say "atomic" when we mean "nuclear." I agree that it is important for a general audience to be aware of the high-school physics, but to call an article idiotic for not insisting on it is not fair.