brainwagon

This QRSS signal was looking a little fuzzy, and then basically split into two different signals. I hadn’t seen it before.

I’ve got the basic code resurrected, but I haven’t got time stamps working again yet. I’ll work on it soon. But if you want a real time glimpse at the 30m MEPT band, you might find http://qrss.info useful. Addendum: Right around noon local, I was getting NM5DV and WA5DJJ pretty well.

Alan, VA3STL posted a nice list of captures of his QRP beacon on his blog, including a link to a spot of him that he got from my grabber. I didn’t notice it then, but now that I’m back on 30m, I’m seeing it nicely at the moment:

I don’t think this is going to work, but I noticed that DP1POL is currently reporting WSPR spots and being spotted from his base in IB59uh. That’s Antartica. I couldn’t resist the temptation to try, so I’ve shifted my WSPR beacon over to 20m and upped the power to 5 watts to see if I […]

I’ve changed my beacon to send “step morse” for a while. It will look like this (thanks to WA0UWH’s grabber): It’s kind of wacky, but here’s the deal: there is a center line frequency which represents the space between characters. The message starts out at the centerline. Anything below the centerline represents a dit, above, […]

Part of the difficulty that I had testing my Softrok was the apparent lack of SDR software for my MacBook. Both WY7USA and NM5DV came through for me though, and suggested that I have a peek at DSPRadio, by Sebastian Mrozek, DO8SEM. It didn’t fix the imbalance/lack of sensitivity that I had, but it did […]

KK7CC has a new grabber online in Las Vegas. I seem to be getting in there pretty well.

Well, since I have Tom’s oscilloscope, I started probing around, measuring the voltages and waveforms of pretty much every location I could find. And, low and behold, I didn’t really find anything wrong. I began to question my earlier assessment that anything was wrong at all. So, I hooked the gadget up again, wired on […]

This morning, I have a particularly nice array of signals streaming across. First NM5DV at the top. He put a T-attenuator onto his Softrock transmitter, knocking his 1watt down to around 400mw. WA5DJJ is banging in again as usual (he’s on virtually the entire day). You can begin to see WB3ANQ’s snake, running in at […]

Amazing. 173 reports today, running just 250mw. And not just really close contacts: I even got one spot two spots from VK6DI. Imagine what I could do with a real antenna! 2009-03-05 02:34 K6HX 10.140133 -14 0 CM87ux +23 0.200 W5OLF DM78hb 1480 920 2009-03-05 02:24 K6HX 10.140133 -13 0 CM87ux +23 0.200 W5OLF DM78hb […]

My friend Tom was kind enough to loan me his oscilloscope, a basic 20Mhz model, but adequate to what I needed it for: testing to see what was going on with my Softrock Lite II. Just for fun, I first tried hooking it up to the simple crystal oscillator/buffer amplifier that I built a few […]

Not only am I currently recieving VK2ZAY’s signal rather well: But he’s concurrently getting into ON5EX’s grabber in Belgium: It’s about 7,400 miles from me to Alan’s beacon, but it’s over 10,000 miles to Belgium from VK-land. Very nice.

Cool.

Bill posted today about W3PM’s design for a dedicated WSPR beacon transciever. It’s very slick: basically a crystal oscillator that can be mixed with the signal from a PC sound card, then piped through a narrow crystal filter and through an amplifier chain into an antenna. Check out the PDF, it’s quite nice. SolderSmoke Daily […]

WA0UWH announced that his awesome grabber was back in a new temporary location, fed by satellite internet. I had some difficulties getting images earlier in the day but it’s up now, and you can easily see my DFCW beacon, sending K6HX.