brainwagon

Having completed my little 40m QRP transmitter (pictures to come sometime soon), I was scouting around trying to find the most appropriate keying options. While a straight key is the obvious choice, I can’t help but thin that a little bit of electronics in the form of a keyer would help me make better sounding […]

Well, I was kind of bored, so I decided to tack together a little CW transmitter. I had picked up a little 40m kit from Ramsey Electronics. It’s a really simple kit: it took me about two hours to solder the entire thing together, I fired it up, and it works! I only had two […]

This week I picked up a spot from 9V1LF in Singapore, as well as a few other more mundane state side locations. I’ve had reception reports from 95 separate stations, from something like 38 states, so I thought it was about time to try to make a new map. Addendum: Redid the map, which is […]

30m was crapping out after about 2:00AM UTC, and I had heard that Christian, WB5FKC was going to be sending QRSS Morse on 40m, just above 7.0008Mhz, so I tuned down and tried recording some. And, miracle of miracles, I got him: If you read across (and know morse) you can see that it says […]

Well, I got bored trying to make PSK31 QSOs amidst all the RTTY contesters, so I flipped back to playing with my WSPR daemon. First thing, I got a spot from W1BW with an SNR of -18, so I flipped over to his visual MEPT spotter, and sure enough, here was the clear “MV” beacon. […]

Bruce finally got his grabber back online, and I swiped the following image from it: In addition to the WSPR digital message, my beacon program sends this “MV” at the same time in the visual portion of the MEPT band. Thanks for you grabber Bruce, very nice. Addendum: Here’s a later grab, showing the “flying […]

My previous maps of WSPR spots didn’t do a great job of showing where my beacon had been heard in the U.S. Here’s another try: Again, still using GMT to draw these.

Well, I took a hint from Bruce, W1BW and modified my beacon to do both WSPR and visual beaconing on 30m. Below, you can see the spectrogram of about 16 minutes of recording at my station. The parts with the background nearly black are when my beacon is transmitting. You can see both the WSPR […]

So, I’ve made some progress on teasing apart enough of the encoding of WSPR beacon messages to write a completely stand alone Python program that will generate the appropriate tone sequence to send out the callsign/grid/power message. For instance, if I type “genwspr KF6KYI CM87 27”, I get: 3, 3, 0, 2, 0, 0, 0, […]

I haven’t had the chance to type up my notes yet on my attempts at beaconing using WSPR, but I did leave my beacon running off and on for the last week. By monitoring signal reports which appear on WSPRnet.org, I learned quite a bit about how the propagation from my location varied depending on […]

Woke up around 4:00AM, couldn’t get back to sleep, so I went downstairs, turned on the radio and caught JH5RXS on 7.0945Mhz booming in. He’s Yukio Nishioka, in Japan and 5496 miles off. He was very, very strong: check out the recording. He kept flipping between working split and working on frequency. Addendum: Apparently this […]

While listening to some WSPR signals (and testing my new encapsulated WSPR beacon) I heard some signals that were throbbing at about the baud rate. Instead of a more or less constant carrier, I’d here them swell and fall, swell and fall repeatedly. When I generated a spectrogram, I got this: You can see a […]

Okay, so I’ve been playing around with generating various kinds of visual signals on the MEPT subband on 30m. That’s the 100hz wide band just above 10.140Mhz, and it’s fun, because there are a number of “grabbers” which have the spectrum displays from their radio receivers available on the web. But there is a minor […]

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 […]

I’ve been trying to monitor (intermittently) some of the beacon activity on 30m. This morning, I managed to capture Amateur Radio Station W1BW, who is transmitting a “W” shaped carrier every few minutes on 10.140050. Here’s my spectrogram from this morning’s recording. The first one seems to be the strongest, but if you look carefully […]