Soft Touch Arts, Leicester

In July 2024, we visited Soft Touch Arts in Leicester (UK) to deliver an Open Wave-Receiver (OWR) workshop. Radio signal is strong in Leicester - the moment we plugged in, we had an incredibly loud signal! Some things we noticed...

• Very long antennas are good! Ours were at least 12 meters. 
• We still got signal when pulling out the ground - it was just less ‘clean’. 
• When touching a scraped end of our very long antenna to a round fence (circling a tree), we suddenly got a secondary station playing alongside the first. Perhaps this extension of the length of antenna caught different frequencies.
• The OWR had a very loud signal through the combo of Zoom H5 + Marshall speaker, so loud we had it on half volume. As soon as the Zoom was removed from the circuit though, the Marshall refused to relay any sound from the OWR. Guessing it has some sort of overdrive protection built in that makes it unfriendly to the fluctuating power of the waves.

We hope this is of some interest to fellow OWR experimenters! We'll be back in Leicester throughout September for more workshops and to participate in an exhibition - more on this soon.