brainwagon

Well, I was experimenting a bit. I dusted off my QRSS3 iTunes beacon idea, and set it going. VE1VDM had his “big ears” grabber going, so I started watching it. He’s in grid FN85ki, which is roughly a 3000 mile path. To help assure success, I was sending 5 watts (horrendous, I know, but I am still testing this stuff and it isn’t yet dark here, so propagation which was terrible all day hasn’t really started up yet). Anyhoo, here’s the screen grab from his grabber:

I’m the signal around 10.140070. If you stare at it closely, you might just see the Morse for KF6KYI repeating (-.- ..-. -…. -.- -.– .. for those who don’t know Morse). I tried sending my slow hell signal as well, but that didn’t cut though very well. I think that’s because I’m splitting the signal into 14 different carriers, and that’s enough to reduce the signal below the detection threshold. Oh well. I think you can also see a slight upward trend in frequency as the transmission continues. As the radio heats up, it probably drifts up slightly.

Addendum: A few minutes later, we got this screen capture. You can see my signal drifting up into some WSPR traffic (which shouldn’t be below 10.140100, naughty!). I discontinued transmission at this point.

Here’s a link to the Greenfield QRSS Grabber

Addendum²: Here’s my attempt to send DFCW (like regular Morse, but “off” times are sent as well, at a frequency about 6 hz lower).

You can see that the temperature stability isn’t that great.

As the transmission continues, the drift does as well:

Addendum³: I dropped the power to 500mw, the lowest setting that the FT-817 can pull off. Here you see that the drift appears to be leveling out, and you can just barely make out the signal. Still, pretty impressive…