This photo confirms my recollection that J-38s could be bought for 98 cents, at least at Walter Ashe Radio here. They went to $1.98 in the late 1950s... my first brush with inflation! 
http://k6ix.net/J-38/Types/J-38-10-8F.jpg

The panadaptor on my Flex-5000 clearly shows the positions of CW stations in QSO. Most are almost precisely on top of each other... within 50 to 100 Hz. 

I also work some QRP with my OHR-100 transceiver, a $150 kit which uses varactor tuning. Getting within 500 Hz is a chore. Its native receive bandwidth is about 1 KHz and the varactor tuning can jump around. I've learned to use an outboard audio filter to get closer to stations I call. Note that some QRP transmitters still use crystal control.


Right. When I got in the hobby novices were lucky if they owned 3 crystals. You called CQ and tuned up and down maybe 20 kHz for replies! Even now not everyone is using a state of the art radio. I'm certainly not going to criticize some Cuban who made his equipment from a 1956 Chevy. Or a guy who's drifted due to problems at his power company. On 160 you may be hearing boat anchors.

I'm not suggesting that a 43' vertical offers anything special on 630 meters. It amounts to a 43' random hunk of wire. It's just what I have at hand. It's not even very usable for transmitting on 160 meters unless base loading is added.

I don't want to tie up this homebrew group too much. There are several email lists devoted to longwave. Most of the 630 meter guys use: http://w7ekb.com/mailman/listinfo/600mrg_w7ekb.com   You can learn their transmitting schedules from that group.

The beacons on 630 operate quite differently than the low power propagation beacons on ten meters and VHF. Because of the high power used, the beacons on 630 don't usually transmit 24/7. They're often off the air as their owners are playing with new ideas. They try different modes. And they vary their power.
 

Minimum number for each of R S & T should be one. Heard a ham give a 5 by zero report to a DX station last week. The DX was so confused that he asked for a repeat:
See http://www.handiham.net/node/156 

The RST system is poor; other systems have been proposed over the decades. Most S-meters have severe shortcomings too. Only Flex receivers have calibrated meters. No receiver has an R-meter or T-meter.   And even a calibrated S-meter wouldn't be useful where the antenna is a small receiving loop or a Beverage or K9AY type etc. 

Your noise on 630 meters is low only because your antenna is poor. A proper dipole for such a low frequency would be nearly 1000 feet long and hundreds of feet high. My antenna is a 43' HF vertical. A proper 1/4 wave vertical would be 500' feet tall! Tiny antennas can hear well on 630 meters; while they don't pick up much signal, they don't pick up much noise either. 

No, I didn't hear that station last night. My antennas were disconnected amid a rain and heavy snow forecast for St. Louis.

I dodged that question because the answer is complicated. Don't know about that particular station but power on 630 meters is usually quoted in EIRP... Effective Isotropic Radiated Power which takes into account the efficiency of the antenna system used. On 630 meters antennas are always very inefficient. It takes a lot of power and a large (by our conventional standards) antenna to produce just 20 Watts EIRP. That's actually a lot of power on 630 meters and probably about the legal maximum when we get a regular allocation there soon.  


There's ALWAYS at least one S-unit if you can detect a signal. S-1 is defined as a "Faint signal, barely perceptible." Note that the RST reporting system dates to 1934. S-meters weren't in common use until much later.

There is ALWAYS noise on 475 KHz!
  

You sure it was WD2SXH/32? Some sources list that station as currently inactive. I was hearing WD2SXH/31 in Virginia pretty well this evening.
http://www.500kc.com/600%20Meter%20Stations.jpg


Conditions weren't great tho. The European AM broadcasters around 162-200 KHz weren't copyable here at all, which is rare. Some run over a million watts!

This site has tons of 600 meter info. (but much is old and disorganized)
http://www.500kc.com/

Conditions have been poor the last few days, but I can usually pick up a few experimenter beacons around 475.0 KHz. Many only transmit in the evening and use Morse or PSK. Some use QRSS. Phone is very rare.

At my St Louis QTH the loudest station is usually WD2XSH/7 in Louisiana on 476.3 which alternates between CW and PSK. I use a normal ham HF vertical into a Flex-5000/Palomar converter. I can also hear ham beacons on my Kenwood TS-850 and TS-430 which have pretty decent longwave reception.

630 Meter Band Mis-routed!

"WRC-12 MF Allocation: In November 2012, the ARRL filed a Petition for Rulemaking with the FCC seeking domestic implementation of the international amateur allocation at 472-479 kHz. The Petition was mistakenly misrouted by the Office of the Secretary to the Mass Media Bureau. After repeated requests over a period of three months, the Petition is now with the Office of Engineering and Technology."

http://www.arrl.org/news/arrl-executive-committee-focused-on-fcc-and-regulatory-items-at-march-meeting

Long ago, when I was about 14 years old, I picked up a used Millen preselector like the one shown below. It helped neither my National NC-88 (which dearly needed help) nor my Collins 75A2. 

Most 1940/50s ham receivers were deaf on 10 meters and the new 15 meter band. So preselectors sold well to the hobby's arriving hordes of wet-behind-the-ears "space cadets." 
 
http://www.isquare.com/personal_pages/millenpreamp.htm

Learn something new everyday: "[preselector] improves the performance of nearly any receiver,..."

Shouldn't you properly attribute that ineloquent blurb to Wikipedia, where you copied it from?

Also: "This article may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards." Cleanup is right! Plus no author is cited. He's probably in the preselector business.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preselector

Receiving tuners may be important for "signal strength purposes" and "to make the receiver happy" [whatever that means] and they're certainly important to people in the business of marketing... tuners.  But the purpose of a receiver is to receive. A tuner will almost never let you receive (hear or copy) a weak signal better. Detune your tuner or switch it out of the signal path and see if weak stations disappear. They won't. Save your money and reduce shack clutter.

Many of the best receiving antennas, such as beverages, are terrible measured by "signal strength purposes."

Joe, SCAF's have been around for ages. Plenty of articles have been written about building them.

Here's a cheap nifty one targeting QRP radios:
http://newenglandqrp.org/nescaf

You probably reached BOB W9KNI who started Idiom about 25 years ago.  Idiom's current owner last I knew was son ROB, W7GH. Bob transferred the company to his son a few years ago. Even though the Idiom site plays off KNI's "fame as a DXer" Dad disavows the connection if you call him about his son's bad service.

http://www.idiompress.com/about.html

Poor service and empty promises were my experience too when I bought a keyer from Idiom several years ago. Rob was always going to "ship next week for sure." You'll probably get your purchase eventually. Took me months, as I recall.

Sure it is, and not just the middle east. Broadcasting was supposed to leave 40 a number of years ago and mostly has.

If the Space Cadet guy was mad about new-fangled phonetics (I had never heard that of him) then he was an idiot. Many phonetic systems co-existed going back to the dawn of line line telegraphy and perhaps before. ARRL even had their own phonetic system years ago.

Somehow recently it has been decided by ham instructors that the NATO system is the only correct one. Which is ridiculous.

Long time ham mag contributor and broadcast engineer Steve Johnston, WD8DAS, gives the teenie weenie CR-1 SDR its first round of objective performance tests.

Scroll down page to read "Initial Performance of CR-1 Receiver" by sbjohnston

http://forums.radioreference.com/software-defined-radio/256366-new-sdr-commradio-cr-1-a-14.html