brainwagon

For fun, I’ve got my new RFSPACE SDR-IQ running on my laptop using Spectrum Lab and monitoring the 30m QRSS beacon subband. I enabled its HTTP server, and now have set up a little cronscript to copy its display to my webserver once a minute. You can see an example display below (showing KC7VHS, AA5CK and WA5DJJ) or you can click on the link below, and get the live version on QRSS.info

K6HX QRSS Grabber.

I’m not sure why the frequency display on the right is wrong. Anybody have any ideas? I probably have missed something in the configuration of Spectrum Lab, but it’s rather like operating the Space Shuttle…

Paul, M1CNK, has a very nice webpage that details his QRSS beacon, constructed as several different kits assembled as modules. Very cool.

qrssbeacon (wiltonpaul).

I am currently running my 2w beacon with the following sequential multi-tone Hellschrieber ID on 30m:

As Colin, G6AVK pointed out, this is likely to be a lot less effective than my previous MV identifier, but if it does work, people might have a better chance of knowing who the beacon actually is. I’ll let it run for a while and see how it does. Propagation is falling off a bit for me now, but might get better later.

Well, last night, I tweaked my recording program to produce recordings in 15 minute chunks and started it running. This morning, I had a bunch of recordings, a short run of which produced the following spectrograms (never tried this Wordpress functionality before hope it works out!):

Addedum: Sigh. Wordpress insisted on converting my nifty names (which told you what time they are recording) to shorter things, which didn’t preserve their relative ordering. Grump. Oh well. I think I got them sorted. By hand. How tedious.

Addendum²: Here’s W8LIW’s beacon, booming in quite strong.

Yesterday, I recorded a couple of hours of signals off of 30m, and ran them through my homegrown spectrogram code for fun. I found the following FSK CW signal (click on it to get it larger):

(The blank regions are the two minute intervals where I am sending a WSPR beacon message.)

With a bit of work, I identified the call, and exchanged email with Ted, AA5CK, who verified that it was his signal. He was operating from grid EM05eh with a power of 50mw into a vertical antenna. From my QTH in CM87ux, that works out to about 1250 miles. Very nice!

W8LIW’s grabber on 30m is currently showing my “MV” beacon transmissions as well as the DFCW of VE1VDM (I presume) and the flying W of W1BW, as well as the faint sawtooth of WB3ANQ. I can’t spot myself on W1BW’s grabber at the moment: my ability to get into Concord, MA seems limited over the last few weeks.