[Lowfer] Looking for recommendations

[John Andrews]

Tony,

This list has been mostly inactive for the last couple of years. I 
suggest you go to the Longwave Club of America website:
http://www.lwca.org
and select "email groups". You can sign up for the LWCA Lowfer mail list 
which is quite busy.

Regarding your question (which you should feel free to ask on the other 
mail list), the converter approach should work fine for casual 
listening. It would allow you to copy aeronautical beacons, longwave 
broadcast stuff from EU, and so forth. It would not be a good choice for 
  the current generation of weak signal stuff, however. For that, you 
would need tuning accuracy down to 1 Hz, and stability in the milliHertz 
range over long periods. That is best done with a receiver having 
synthesized tuning. If you use a converter ahead of it, the stability of 
the oscillator in that converter has to be considered.

Most of the guys doing weak-signal work are using current model ham 
receivers or transceivers without converters. The Icom R75 is a popular 
receiver, and there are certainly others.

John Andrews, W1TAG