Comparing antennas on RX

I have three HF antennas - and three rigs: The trusty 817, and a couple of shack rigs. I've been "testing" the setup on RX by running three copies of WSPR 2.0 in parallel, on the same band, one connected to each radio (I use SignaLink boxes as interfaces)

The antennas are a couple of long wires, running similar but not identical routes, and an inductively loaded vertical I bought many years ago from sandpiper aerials - it's been lying behind the garage where it was placed when we moved house a few years ago, and everything is seized. I set it up on a fence at the bottom of the garden. It has now grown its own earth stake. I can't tune it for resonance because of the corrosion so the setup I made when it was new is stuck in place. Two or three of the bands - 12,15 and 17 metres - tune reasonably well directly. 40m is a complete no-go, and the others needed tuning.

A few months ago the winner, on most bands, was a LW/earth stake, tuned through an SGC Mac-200 to my Icom 756 ProIII.

Now, things are very different. I have spent the day with this trio, moving down the bands. So far, I've played with 21MHz,14 MHz, 17MHz and 10MHz. The 817 / LW appears to be deaf. It's generally around 12dB down on the winner. The Winner is the corroded Sandpiper which is, as I write, capturing some Stateside stuff on 30m which neither of the others sniff at. The 756 is pretty effective on the LW, generally turning in about 3-6dB down on the vertical

So what has changed? I'm guessing saturated ground probably has a fair bit to do with it. The earth on the vertical must be pretty effective at the moment, since the ground is sodden.

I'm trying to work out why I now find the 817 deaf. I'm sure I remember being pleasantly surprised by it....

I hope to move down to 3.5 and 1.8 this evening. I am confidently predicting that the vertical, with an immense loading coil on it, will not out-perform a long wire. And, of course, on 160m there is no choice.

[Later]

The situation on 80m is surprisingly even. All three systems perform around the same level - in each case, one is a few dB up or down on the others, and all three have good and bad moments. I'm surprised the Sandpiper does so well. Or, maybe, to put it another way, are the long wires doing badly?

the next step is to rotate the antennas around the rigs

472KHz WSPR

I'd read around of people using Icom 706s, which apparently transmit a peep on 472KHz, and thought I'd polish the 756 ProIII and see what I could do. No possibility of transmitting - I haven't a NoV, and I suspect I don't have an antenna suitable.So I thought I'd try listening.

No preamp (the Icom Pre-Amp doesn't turn on in this frequency range) but connected it up to the usual LW. The tuner doesn't seem to do very much either, but there was a ripple of activity on the spectrum display

Started up WSPR, and left it for half an hour, and here's the result.

Much better than I expected. The received wisdom was that an external preamp is needed. Well, it would undoubtedly make a difference, but I'm hearing these two guys at about -13dB, so it's "comfortable" (for WSPR).

And a nice way to open playtime with 630metres.

Meteor Scatter

The recent Geminid meteor shower got me wondering whether I could hear anything with my current, rather lowly setup, having pretty much failed with satellites (that's another story...) so I set to to discover information on where the action is

It is not that easy to find, of course! http://www.astrosurf.com/luxorion/qsl-meteor-scatter.htm is quite informative on gear if not frequencies. So, having read and digested that I then went looking for where the skeds are arranged

Every web page points you to pingjockey, but as far as I can see nearly everything, if not everything, is US based. Then there's on4kst's pages. These are used by Europeans. Once logged in you'll find pages with QRGs on.

But in the end, I heard activity using the good old fashioned route of rotating the large knob on the front and listening. 144.370 seems to be used as a calling channel, certainly in Europe. Indeed, activity seems to be so sparse that the two calls I have heard so far have all opted to carry out the QSO on the channel, which certainly makes life easier

Then there's the mode. ISCAT seems to be the flavour used for 6m MS, because the bursts are longer. A slower mode is preferable. However, for 2m, FSK441 seems to be the mode of choice: it gets the entire message in several times in a short space of time.

So, I'm listening using FSK441 on 144.370. Fortunately, it's all recording what it hears and, much to my surprise, I have managed to capture a couple of CQ calls from foreign stations on my collinear.

The best so far is one from EA3AXV, captured at 16:02 on the 16th. Here's what I saw:

I wonder what power and antenna system he was using. he's about 1300km from me, so the capture is a good one

There is, according to the experts, no point in even trying a QSO without substantially more than 100W and a beam. The beam must be a mixed blessing, and I imagine one doesn't want too much directivity.

http://stardate.org/nightsky/meteors is a useful reference for when showers occur. But there is always activity.

Using WSPR

I thought I'd try using WSPR to work out where to expend my loggable efforts this morning (the WX being fit for nothing else)

Five minutes on WSPRnet maps followed by a quick hour on 40m WSPR convinced me that 40m was a band worth trying. Here is the result of an hour or so this morning, on the 817 at 1W to a LW:

So, I get the better rig out, power about 20W, tune to 7.039MHz (I looked it up on http://hflink.com/jt65/ - I don't often try 40m JT65) and set up a JT65 CQ. Twenty minutes later, I have heard absolutely nothing. Eventually, I fetch up the PSKReporter map and discover three monitors on 40m, but they are all on 7.076MHz.

My bandplan says 7.076 is all modes but excludes digimodes.

Confused.

Anyway, I migrate up to 7.076 and, of course, it's knee deep in SSB. I've got one decode, but I can't see anything clear to TX into.

40m is a mess!

30m by accident

I ended up on 30m by accident. The 817 on 80m and the 756 on 160m didn't get on - desensing wasn't the word. The antennas were "coupled" in every sense of the word. So I stuck the 817 on 30m and 5W and left it to it.

This is a couple of hours this evening on my usual unsophisticated antenna system ( a bit of wire).

I must get a real mode out on 30m in the evening.

The interesting thing here is that this particular piece of wire runs pretty much east-west. So how does this work?

JT9-1 success

I downloaded v0.5 of the JT9-1 experience from Joe Taylor's Website - you want WSJT-X - and it's a MUCH better experience. It all seems to work nicely.

I've tried it relatively low power (around 10W) on 160 metres, and have worked my way up to middle europe on it. The QSOs are reliable, it tunes well, and it's acquired some of the enhancements that HT65-HF has - the red and green bars, the click to continue the QSO. And it is MUCH more spectrum frugal than JT65 - and yes, it even gives positive reports sometimes

All good. I look forward to working you :-)

160m Opera

Just when I thought I wouldn't accomplish anything interesting this week because of work commitments an interesting bit of DX popped out of the bag.

Opera, which looks like a slightly clunkier version of WSPR, sits on my desktop. If tempted to turn it on I seem to end up on 14.065 because that's where everyone else is. So, this time I didn't - 1.836 MHz, 10 watts, and off down the garden for a cup of tea.

I pop back a bit later and there's a 2-way (heard and hearing, which Opera decorates with the label "QSO") with RX3DHR, in KO94ks. That's 2700 km, approximately, which beats my previous DX of just under 2000 km. Bear in mind all my QSOs are low power, if not strictly QRP.

Opera is worth a try if you like this sort of digital mode. It's all a bit low-tech in comparison with WSPR. The WSPR algorithm looks state-of-the-art. Opera's is a twist on QRSS CW so, as I write, the rig is being keyed by the soundcard sending an Opera beacon. Allegedly, the performance is beter than WSPR. I have yet to corroborate that - The consensus of opinion seems to be that it's about the same, but since far fewer souls spend their lives in Opera, WSPR gets far more DX because there are more people playing.

Could do with a few more on some bands though. 2m WSPR beaconing seems to be an inefficient way of warming the shack up...

More distance stats

Back to statistics. This time, I've just looked at the distance. This looks pretty Poisson-like, and I need to think why.

(Click the chart to make it bigger) Each column is a 1000km slice. There are obvious reasons for the steps in it. The second column being bigger than the first is skip. Sub-1000km QSOs are rarer because of skip. The first step at 5000 km is the Eastern seaboard of the United States coming in. To the left of that, there's a gentle fall off as we progress over Europe (bear in mind I've popped all the bands into one pot here).

The second step is as we cross the relatively barren and difficult lands of India and China to Japan, thence to Australia and New Zealand, who lurk off on the right hand end. 20,000 km is about as far as you can do until SETI makes some discoveries.

So, clearly it gets more difficult with increasing distance (no surprises there). But it's also influenced by the difficulty of working DX in certain countries because of the lack of amateur activity there. There are, for example, only an estimated 800 hams in PR China - whereas there are 1.3 million in Japan.

But then, 800 is more than the total number of us involved in WSPR (about 500).

Sources:

• http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/lif_ama_rad_ope-lifestyle-amateur-radio-operators
• http://wsprnet.org/drupal/wsprnet/stats

Footnote - where is Australia on that data about ham operators? New Zealand? Anyone know a better source?

Log Analysis

What to do on a quiet day, but look at your logs. I have been meaning to do this for some time. I extracted the last 1000 or so QSOs from my log (kept in HRD) and I've analysed distance, by band. I was convinced that I was getting the "best" results out of my kit on 17 metres. It appears that this may not be the case!

The graphic isn't very clear (click on it) but I poured the exported data into "R"(a stats package) and got it to process it for me. The distance is in km. It's worth saying that virtually none of these contacts are SSB or FM - I am almost exclusively digital or CW

20m appears to have provided me with my best DX(a ZL), so it retains its label as a DX workhorse of the bands. followed by 10m, 15m and then 17m. I'd say 12m was underperforming - probably my antenna. I don't spend much time on 30m. I find 40m crowded. I don't stay on 80 or 160m long enough in the evening to pick up real DX.

What is interesting is that the median distance - half the contacts are above, half below - (indicated by the bold line in the middle) on 20m is way down on the median distance on 17m - I think this is caused by heavy local (i.e. European) QRM drowning out the DX, hence my impression that 17m at M0DEV is more DX-y. If you have a very high presence of european stations, then you won't hear the DX - even though it is there. Indeed, 17m at M0DEV has the highest Median. Of course, I am probably skewing this by going after DX contacts calling CQ, and ignoring the locals. The 20m distribution (and 15m and 40m) is classic positive skew, bunched up at the bottom end. The 17m distribution looks more "interesting".

It would be interesting to take this further, and try to tease out factors which are caused by my equipment, and factors which are really "there".

So what does it all add up to? Very litte!

WSPR on 40 metres

A half an hour this afternoon, and the arrival of an Elecraft T1 (portable automatic ATU) prompted a little play - I threw a piece of wire out of the shack, over a drainpipe, connected the other half to a metal washing line post, connected up the 817, dropped it onto 40m, tuned it (4 seconds) and started up WSPR.

Running about 5W for the moment, the only mistake I made was to forget to set the mode to DIG (Yaesu rigs only take the audio input from the rear connector in this mode - it you're in USB the input comes from the MIC)

Quite pleasing after a few minutes to see a bit of "DX" arriving. The plot above is after about 15 minutes of operation this afternoon. The 10m plot at G4ILO looks distinctly tastier...:-(

The T1 tunes very quickly, quietly and efficiently. It's a lot less trouble than my old ZM3 Z-Match, which worked well, but I was always suspicious of losses, particularly above 18 megs. To tune, one presses a button for a bit, then transmits - there's a visual indication of SWR on the top. Next time round (because I bought the swanky 817 lead) as you change bands a light flashes to say it's restored the last set of settings. It uses no power once it's latched.

I had to get it from qrpproject.de in Germany. I've dealt with them before - no import duty, pretty quick despatch. I couldn't find a UK dealer with them- so the hobby is *that* bad then?

I toyed with making one, but the prospect of winding coils threw me into a fit of buy-it-assembled. The other fear I have is of surface mount stuff. I have done ONE SMT before - the k1el keyer, IIRC. It wasn't that bad, but I remember getting into a sweat beforehand.

JT65- the appeal

I've been trying to think what appeals to me about JT65. It's an odd mode to use - you're restricted to a formulaic exchange of position, signal reports and that's it. And a full QSO takes 7 (seven) minutes. PSK31 is positively sprinty after an hour of JT65. PSK31 got me back into radio about ten years ago. I blow hot and cold, and the really narrow bandwidth of PSK31, the technical appeal of the whole thing got me going again. I even sat down and learned CW to get onto HF (I was a G7 at the time - VHF only). But the rubber stamp QSOs - inevitable when I suspect most amateurs cannot type, and the inevitable RSQ 599 reports are irritating. So, PSK31 got me onto HF, and I migrated to CW. But JT65 has a number of appeals over CW and PSK. Firstly, the signal reports are genuine. You know you're being a LID (-03) or using your power justifiably (-24), and can adjust accordingly. You realise how fickle propagation is when you get a -03 from Italy, and a -20 from south east France five minutes later. Or how directional your antenna is, or how variable other amateur's rx performance is.....

The other really neat thing is that you can see, using pskreporter and to a certain extent, the RB (Reverse Beacon network), how successful you are being, even if no-one is prepared to talk to a lowly, common as muck M0.

So I keep coming back to it. I can work DX using 10W off a low LW hidden in the trees at the side of my garden. I can't do that in CW or PSK as easily.