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Technology Showcase
CCRadioplus and A Potent AM DXing Combo by James Careless
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“The Best Radio for Long Range AM Reception” and “the best compact antenna for a portable radio or home stereo”? Well, that’s how C. Crane Company describes its CCRadioplus and its Justice AM antenna. But are they? Well, “best” is a very hard term to quantify. However, when compared to the venerable Panasonic RF2200—a legendary AM Ding machine in its own right—the combined CCRadioplus/Justice Antenna more than hold their own. Basic Descriptions Both the CCRadioplus and the Justice Antenna come from the fertile brains at C. Crane Company. Located in Fortuna in northern California, C. Crane is a family-run firm dedicated to building and selling innovative electronics. In this case, the CCRadioplus is the second generation of the company’s CCRadio. Designed by C. Crane chief engineer Chris Justice and Sangean’s Mr. Pai, the CCRadioplus is meant to be the ultimate AM receiver for talk radio. The reason: C. Crane owner/president Bob C. Crane adores talk radio—he just can’t get enough of it. Trouble is, when he moved from Silicon Valley to Fortuna some years back, Bob couldn’t tune in his favorite talk radio shows reliably on AM. That’s what led him to develop the CCRadio, which is manufactured for C. Crane by Sangean (as is the Justice Antenna). Of course, even the best DXing machine can have trouble picking up signals. In this case, Bob wanted to improve the CCRadio’s performance in his home with an external antenna. The answer, as devised by Chris Justice, was the Justice AM Twin Coil antenna. Now the Justice Antenna isn’t the only tunable AM antenna on the market. However, what makes it stand out is Chris Justices’ patent-pending “twin coil” design. What he’s done is wrap coils at either end of the Justice’s ferrite bar antenna in order to boost signal gain. As Chris Justice told Pop’Comm, When I was playing around with the ferrite bar, I noticed that it had magnetic anomalies. This means that both ends have an energy field; one positive, and one negative. I got the idea to put coils on both ends to capture both fields and sum them—with the aid of a tuning transformer—into a higher gain signal. The result is that the RF is effectively doubled,, or better at the receiver. |
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