brainwagon

Well, inspired by Bruce’s “Flying W” beacon, and realizing that it was a pretty nice and efficient way to send out an easily identified beacon signal, I coded up a really simple little program to generate the “MV” beacon signal (my initials). I then powered on the FT-817, while I didn’t see anything registered on Bruce’s grabber, Vernon’s VE1VDM logger managed to deliver the goods:

I started with the nominal 5 watts, of which I probably radiate a bit more than 1 watt because of antenna losses (I’m guessing). I then tried cranking it down to 500mw, which would have been about 100mw ERP, and we seemed to have lost the signal. I raised it a bit, and we’ll see how we do in a few more minutes.