Beacon Gremlins

I was having some difficulty spotting my beacon: both on WA0UWH’s grabber, and via WSPR spots. I figured that maybe my jury rigged antenna had fallen down, or I had some kind of similar hardware failure. Oddly though, my receiver seemed to be going strong.

I went over to my setup, and found that the power meter on my FT-817 was indicating basically no power going out. A few more minutes of checking cables and the like found out that my laptop had somehow muted its audio output, and therefore, wasn’t sending any signal out. I groaned, cranked it back up, and then verified it was putting out a signal, and went to bed.

In the morning, no WSPR spots remotely. None.

I was puzzled, until I thought to check the time on my laptop. Oddly, it was about 23 seconds off. WSPR is synchronized so that you transmit on even number minute intervals, and if you are more than a few seconds off, it won’t find you. The odd thing? I run the Network Time Protocol on my macbook: it should keep perfect time! I killed off the ntpd daemon, and it restarted, and was then resynchronized. I’m back to normal operation.

One thought on “Beacon Gremlins

  1. Bill I0/N2CQR

    Mark: Always reassuring to hear the tales of technical woe of others. Reminds you that you are not alone.

    Your comments about the timing thing with WSPR transmissions has caused me to re-think the idea of using an MP3 player to run the WSPR audio. Seems like the synch thing would be a show stopped for that.

    Installed an SBL-1 balanced modulator into my MEPT rig. Now I just need some audio amplifiers betweeen the line our and the rig, and I should be WSPRing.

    73 Bill

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