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!

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!

Kit or No Kit?

I'm posting this because I am amused. Two exhibits below, one is WSPR using TX 5W, TS-2000, Vertical antenna, proper earthing system. The other is 817/500mW/bit of wire. Both are about 6 hours worth of snapshot (?)

Exhibit A

Exhibit B:

You know the answer, of course:

Exhibit A is 17m, 5W, Vertical antenna, TS-2000, proper earth,...
Exhibit B is 10m, 500mW, two bits of wire, one a bit longer and 817
So, why do we need kit?