The Skanti R 8003 is a professional communications receiver made in Denmark between 1994 and 1996. The R 8003 was built for the maritime communications market, and was often found aboard navy or merchant vessels as well as in coast stations around the world, when radio was still an essential element of security at sea.
The receiver is a solid state, double-conversion superheterodyne. It covers from 10 to 30,000 kHz, though performance between 10 and 100 kHz is reduced compared to the rest of the spectrum.
The front head of the radio is detachable, so the receiver can be remotely operated up to about 100 meters.
Something very convenient about the R 8003 is its self-test facility, which would point specifically at any of the modules of the receiver in case of trouble.
My R 8003 comes from the Navy, decommissioned after an illustrious career at sea. It works very well indeed, within factory specifications. I would say it particularly shines on long and medium wave. The CW (telegraphy) filters, combined with the action of the BFO control (which in practice is quite similar to the action of passband tuning) results in the receiver being able to pull weak signals from the noise, as I have tried to demonstrate in this video. A few years ago I shot a few other videos of my R 8003 on ham bands and on long and medium waves.
