Steve
Noise: That's the first thing I noticed. I'd be going nuts with a S9 noise level. Imagine what stations that weren't being heard - or was he fudging around with the RF gain?
AL
Wow... that is worst than my noise level. I assume the SWL who made the video is either in a city or heavily populated suburban area where you get clobbered by all sorts of QRM, a lot of which comes from computer and networking equipment and consumer electronics junk.
Years ago a ham/swl friend of mine moved from this area up to the rural Adirondacks. He was used to the high noise levels we have here constantly. When he arrived at his new place and fired up his receivers he thopught at fiorst the receiver was broken or the antenna was disconnected. He simply was not used to the low noise levels.
During the recent hurricane my power was out for 5 days. I managed to fire up a battery operated MW/HF receiver. I couldn't believe how low the noise was. I was pulling in weak signals from everywhere with a piece of wire out the window. As soon as the power cam back and the computers , networking, and consumer junk came back on it was history.
