First a disclaimer: I am NOT a professional photographer, and I do not claim to be a hot-shot amateur ditto either, but....
...after seeing hundreds of rig-shots taken by various people, I must say that a brief "how-to" is apropriate here. Quite a lot
of pictures are taken point blank, with a flash! Hmm. Imagine that radio's reflective, shiny front panel with a flash, in a straight angle right into it. I'm sorry, but this does NOT make a good picture. If a flash is arranged in this way, you will only end up with a bright over-exposed spot in the middle.
When I want to take a picture, I arrange the radio on a dark surface, facing a window (at a slight angle) during a fairly sunny day, thus NOT using a flash at all. With this arrangement, I get a smooth, even illumination of the radio. Then I power it up to light up any display, LED or lamp. The picture is then taken from a slightly elevated angle to give the picture some degree of perspective. It certainly helps if you use a manual camera where you are in control of exposure timing and aperture settings. Use a small aperture and longer exposure. Use a stand to avoid fuzzy pictures. If your camera has a zoom lens, it's best to back away from the target and zoom it instead to minimize picture distortion. It may take some experimentation but the result is definitely worth the effort.
The Super Searcher is basically a portable, very sensitive frequency counter, connected to an antenna of your choice. It also has the possibility to "reaction tune" any Icom CI-V or AOR receiver/scanner to the locked frequency. Got the picture yet? Well this is going to be fun. Take this setup out on the road, preferrably to a main street with a lot of traffic, and BINGO! As soon as there is someone fairly close by, pressing the PTT on his/her transceiver, the Super Searcher locks onto the frequency, passes the frequency information to the Icom/AOR receiver and voila! With no effort at all, you can listen to, and start logging those presumably unknown frequencies.
I have also done some snooping from the car. By connecting the Super Searcher to an external antenna, the range of detection will be greater. If you drive around your town with this setup, you'll have frequencies and communications popping up as you pass the transmitters. The range of detection is of course depending on several factors: your antenna, the transmitting antenna, the frequency in question and of course the power output.
There are a few drawbacks too. Being a broadband device, the Super Searcher may be blocked when passing certain strong, wideband transmitters such as aviation radar sites, cellular dittos, broadcasting towers and multiple transmitter clusters. To test this, I hooked up the gear and went to Bromma Airport which is close to home, and parked within a 100 meters from the radar ball. This radar operates just above 1.3 GHz (1300 MHz). The Super Searcher could neither detect the Air-to-ground comm's antennas about 25 meters behind the car, nor my very own 2m/70cm/23cm HT with 300 mW output, 20 cm away. I had to move the HT as close as 8-10 cm from the Super Searcher in order for it to detect my transmission. Talk about blocking! This is however a relatively small problem that in practice won't matter that much. The extremist will buy and connect a megabuck preselector with 2 MHz bandwidth, thus selecting a small portion of the spectrum to be detected (you will miss a lot this way). A better approach would probably be a notch filter for 88-108 MHz and maybe a lowpass filter to block everything above, say 480 MHz.
The other drawback is impossible to remedy. The Super Searcher can not detect and pass the mode of transmission. You will have to set it manually on your radio. This is however a minute problem as most comm's except aviation is done with FM.
There are of course other manufacturers with similar devices offering "reaction tune" such as Optoelectronics, but this one won't cost you an arm and a leg. I had mine for only 1500:- SEK in Sweden. In UK the price is £99 (summer 2000).
The Watson Super Searcher comes with rechargable batteries, a wall charger and a telescopic antenna. It also has a bargraph to indicate relative signal strength. It's a fun tech-toy and a must-have for the scanner-hyena.
Of course, a full featured, megabuck spectrum analyzer will do the job under any circumstances (except reaction tune), no matter what the RF environment looks like, but the huge price for such a device is likely to deter most hobbyists (like me).
I have also done some snooping from the car. By connecting the Super Searcher to an external antenna, the range of detection will be greater. If you drive around your town with this setup, you'll have frequencies and communications popping up as you pass the transmitters. The range of detection is of course depending on several factors: your antenna, the transmitting antenna, the frequency in question and of course the power output.
UG-21 STG
UHF Spezial
Deltaohm 1/2"
Deltaohm 1/2"
Teracom 7/8
Teracom 7/8