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During the 'NDB Season' between December 2022 and March 2023 I wanted to see how many beacons I could hear using my 1941 RBA-1 Navy Receiver. I logged 207 NDB.
This season, December 2023 to March 2024, I decided to try and beat last years effort and found it very challenging to do so considering LF/MF propagation decreased as we enjoyed the benefits of the Cycle 25 maximum on the HF bands. Many long and enjoyable hours were spent with the RBA-1 and I ended up with 210 NDB's logged by the end of March, and it took me a few weeks to get those last 3!
The antenna was a PA0RDT active miniwhip up 16 feet with the occasional use of a 6 foot amplified whip up 3 feet positioned near the miniwhip. The RBA-1 has a Broad / Narrow audio filter setting. The Narrow setting on my unit works only marginally. It is a narrow band-pass filter in a potted assembly and I didn't feel like unpotting and rebuilding it, so I used my external Timewave 599zx Audio Filter to simulate the 400 Hz bandwidth of that filter. This will sound abnormally wide to most LF enthusiasts, but I wanted to use the radio close to its original capability. If that last statement sounds strange to those not familiar to NDB DXing, my typical audio bandwidths I used with my SDR are between 7 and 15 Hz Results: 210 NDBs logged. Farthest beacon logged: 323 TAB in Trinidad & Tobago - 2197 miles.
Here are the locations of most of the logged beacons:
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