That’s Northern Utah. Mark, KU7Z noted lots of activity stateside, and here’s his screengrab:

I’m getting into Seattle pretty well all day too. Some odd propagation on 30m today: I saw VK2ZAY on W8LIW’s grabber around 20:00UTC, which I think is too early to be gray line. Still no European spots for me.

It appears that WA5DJJ and I have chosen the same frequency space to operate in. Here’s the view from WA0UWH’s grabber:

This is the problem with the growing popularity of QRSS: finding a lane on the information superhighway MEPT goat path.

Last night, I got home, made my wife some pork tenderloin with maple glaze, and then about 9:30 settled in with my laptop and started to think about what I should do about getting my QRSS software ready for release. I was pretty pleased with my “record” program: it had been steadily receiving and recording .WAV audio for my beacon for about three days, and was consuming only about 2% of my CPU, so the laptop stayed nice and cool. I have a separate program which I can use to render these .WAV files intro spectrograms, and I think I understand how to do that. What I didn’t have was an idea how I was going to convert these bits into a working, functional system that was flexible and cool.

It’s kind of in the same state as my oscillator, buffer amp, and RF Power meter circuit I have breadboarded on the dining room table at the moment.

In such cases, you have two choices: you can think carefully and design your next step, or you can heat up the soldering iron/C compiler, and just experiment.

I chose to do the later.

The result of an additional hour of coding was a melding of the two programs: I created qrssrecord, a Frankenstein combination of both recording and FFT software. It now uses portaudio, libsndfile, fftw3 and libjpeg (all pretty standard, portable libraries) and records 8khz audio, saves it to disk in chunks of programmable length (currently 5 minutes) and simultaneously does all the FFT magic to plot out the spectrograms for the signal in chunks of the same length. I left it running as I went to bed, having checked to see that the first few images I saw were of some FSK CW signal, which appeared to be an upside down VK2 station….

I was puzzled by this. I hadn’t seen a reverse shifting Australian station before. Was this some new station I had not seen before? I saw VK4ZW was coming in my WSPR spots. Was it him?

In the morning all was clear: I had a bug in my program. The signal was upside down because I screwed up and drew them upside down. It was in fact the now familiar callsign of VK2ZAY:

Heh. I’ll need to fix the bug. I’m not quite sure that this exact structure is what I want in my final program. I think it closely links two programs which we might not wish to closely link. After all, you’ll need some code (or want some code) to render out .wav files at a later date, perhaps with different settings, so why not just use a separate program all along? But for now, I think I’ll use it for further experimentation.

I’ve also dropped my beacon to broadcasting only once every 12 minutes, so I can get more recordings. Sometimes, the black bar of my own transmissions occurs at very inopportune spots.

I took Monday off, and mostly sat around the house with my wife. Still, I managed to get a couple of ham radio related activities done. I worked on removing all the compiled in constants from my program for doing unattended audio recording. Basically, my program uses “portaudio” to record audio with the rate, depth and channels you specify. I use it to record 8khz audio of WSPR and MEPT beacon activity for later analysis, but you could also use it to recording I/Q audio from a softrock at 48khz (or even 96khz) and later playback. The way it is currently setup is to dump 15 minutes of audio at a time into separate files, but that is reconfigurable as well. I’m satisfied with the general logic of the program now, but it needs a bit of work in the option handling and in signal handling to make it robust. It takes less than 2 percent of the CPU of my laptop to record my audio, and I bet that I could lower that even further with a little “impedence matching” between the portaudio and sndfile libraries. Right now, I read floats from portaudio, and send floats to sndfile. If we agreed that 16 bit was good from both, presumably that would avoid a couple of recasting operations.

Anyway, in between all this hacking I managed my first voice QSO on 40m with WY7USA using 5w on my FT-817. I’ve had problems working local stations, but apparently this 600-700 mile skip zone works pretty well.

Overnight, I also see a new New Zealand spot from ZL2FT on WSPR. That’s neat…

But the niftiest overnight thing seemed to be my reception of both VK6DI and VK2ZAK VK2ZAY (thanks David, VK6DI for the correction) on the 30m MEPT band. You can also see NM5DV sandwiched in there with regular Morse. VK6DI is running a signal of 500mw into a dipole, and reports that VK2ZAY is running 1.5 watts into a short loaded vertical antenna.

This recording started about 1:13 AM Pacific time, and I had pretty good reception for over an hour.

Addendum: Eldon, WA0UWH up in Seattle (CN97) caught my SMT beacon, and sent me this screengrab:

He’s setting up his own grabber, which is completely awesome! I’m working toward my own dedicated grabber too.

David, WA5DJJ sent me the following screengrab. He collects the prize as the first (and clearest thusfar) report of my new SMT beacon.

With some imagination, you might believe that you can see my signal here from W8LIW’s grabber. You can certainly see NM5DV’s signal booming in.

Addendum: Oops. Had the wrong image linked at first. This one is better.

Addendum²: Alan, VA3STL, send me this screen dump:

M0AYF has a great bunch of information about QRSS operation. It’s really good stuff: filters, antennas, frequency standards, receivers, you name it! Very, very cool. Worthy of reading and constructing.

Equipment used at M0AYF for QRSS.

Dan, NM5DV is now operating a 1w CW beacon on 30m from grid square DM75. His blog is here, and he’s doing a great job of writing about lots of his projects. Both of us also hang out of IRC on the irc.freenode.com network, in the #hamradio channel, and it seems like I’ll idly muse about doing something, someday, and Dan will just order the parts and do it. 🙂

Check out this morning’s recording of his beacon signal (interspersed with my own MV signal):

Addendum: Larry, W8LIW, sent this screengrab out to the Knights mailing list. You can see my “MV” at the edge, and also NM5DV’s morse panning across the display.

This morning began like any other. I logged in, checked my email, and searched wsprnet.org for WSPR spots of my beacon, to see if any unusual callsigns have shown up overnight. I saw that ZL3IN managed to spot me overnight (I’ve gotten him a few times), but I also saw WA2YUN, reporting me from grid square RK39hh. RK39hh? Where the heck is that?

It turns out it’s Wake Island.

It’s a tiny coral atoll in the Pacific, only a couple miles across, and has played an interesting role in the history of the United States, particularly during the Second World War. I find it very cool that Colin is over there, running a WSPR listener.