Radio Is Odd

I'm perpetually surprised by what keeps me coming back to this curious pastime of ours. I've blown hot and cold about it for years, but today has been an interesting day. Not because of the log - five or so entries, and no great DX - a CW with G3SES in Chester on 80m being memorably because we had a chat. And an attempt at 70cm WSPR with G4VXE being memorably because we didn't.

Working with cheap wires means what whilst I'm playing with CW on 80 and WSPR on 70cm I can leave the 817 (ex-SOTA, battered...) with the Very Long Wire Across End Of Garden running on 160m.

I had thought that 10m would be interesting today. It looked that way about 09:40z, when the continent had an opening to VK land. That didn't metamorphose over to the UK and, byt he time I got home from work at 1PM, 10m was dead.

160m yielded this this afternoon:

I've been on my usual 500mW, and the two DX contacts are "heard me" and, in the case of OZ7IT, it worked both ways - almost a QSO.

What's really interesting is that I have started to use WSPR to look at propagation. Instead of the International Beacon Project. It looks to me as if 10m prop, for example, is much more granular. The opening to VK this morning was quite a small footprint on the map. And the key thing was, there were enough of the WSPR dummies doing all the legwork to produce the map.

Utterly brilliant. Thanks Joe! And the JT9-1 QSO on 17m with OM5NA was a nice catch. He was buried under QRO RTTY. Didn't stop JT9-1 working.

And today's log contains 6 entries. Content!

The 9:1 Un-un, and the Long Wire

I have just had a quick play with the antenna setup for my 817 WSPR rig. It has been running via the Elecraft T1, to a BNC bindingpost, with the LW and the earth connected directly to it. The T1 doesn't tune up perfectly on 80m (or 160).

I've run the 817/T1/Un-un in parallel with a TS2000, connected to another LW, run through an SGC Mac-200 tuner, which specifically copes with random wire antennas very well. I've had it for years.

I am running two copies of WSPR. One connected to the 817, one to the TS-2000, both through identical SignalLink interfaces, on the same PC. The windows are side by side. Both are set RX only for this test. One of them is uploading

Both rigs on 3.592.600, both RX. The 817 (without the Un-un) is consistently level or 1 dB down on the TS-2000. They hear practically identically (even though the TS-2000 has the preamp switched in). With the un-un on the 817, between the T1 and the wire, the antenna tunes nicely, but I am 7-8dB down from the RX on the TS-2000

Hmmm.

Tuning up...

I'm sat, for some odd reason, on 3.516.7 right now (Ok, I've been listening to CW). And I cannot believe how many of us are tuning up down there.

It's quite clearly THE place to go tune up. Heaven help any QSOs going on down there.

The Elecraft T1 needs no tuning up - it remembers what it did several days ago. Bt my 500mW isn't cutting the ice on 80m

Strange 80m WSPR

Spotted on 80m this afternoon:

1714 -20 4.3 3.594105 -1 R56ZDJ HQ72 23

HQ72 is east side of Greenland.
He's using 250mW. And I'm the only person to hear him. 2400km away.

Pirate? Russian vessel?

Later. Another phantom:

0316 -19 2.8 3.594102 0 JM9BQV OC99 7

That's in the Southern Oceans, and 7 equates to 5mW :-) WSPR is error correcting. I haven't looked at the code, but I would imagine the probability of an error is virtually zero. And I get two in an afternoon?

The only feasible explanation I can think of is if someone fairly local is constructing a WSPR beacon and hasn't got the data right? But two? and at 03:16 in the morning?

Very odd.