DX-ing

One of the more annoying features of propagation is that our signals get weaker the further they travel. This adds to the general frisson of working DX and nowhere is this more apparent than with JT65 and the "weak" modes.

Let's talk hypothetically. I see a nice tasty piece of DX pop up on the decode list - let's say it's Hawaii or somewhere quite difficult to get from the UK. I'm running about 10W which, as far as I am concerned is about the reasonable limit (I might occasionally go up to 20W on 160m when it's silent and I know I am not getting out). What almost invariably happens is that a station nearer to the "dx" will call at the same time, and our friend only gets one decode - the stronger one. So I wait till next time. And so on

This makes working pile-ups in JT65 (an odd concept, I know, but it does happen) almost impossible. I've watched one or two and, what happens often is an arms race. The combatants are blissfully unaware of each others existence. All they know is that they are on frequency and the guy isn't responding. So it's a little tweak on the power. After two or three goes the power is quite clearly, shall we say, large, and neither party has got through. Progress is only made when one of the pair gives up.

Compare this with CW, where one can work split, and the callers can (and do...) smear out along a portion of spectrum so that the DX can pick them off one by one.

Now I have a low boredom threshold. I listen to CW pileups and maybe have a halfhearted go, but I don't stand much chance with 50W and a LW. I *can* work DX in JT65, but it's frustrating because there are unscrupulous players with large power knobs.

So, make it your New Year Resolution to support the DX Code of Conduct

The DX Code of Conduct

And, if you want a sad and slightly different tale, try reading Randy Johnson's piece here

I wish...

This was not bidirectional. I heard him. He didn't hear me.

Nuuk and Greenland would be utterly great for me. But that's the frustration of WSPR - it's amazing to see what you can pick up using simple wire antennas (in my case, frozen to a height of 2m) but these aren't QSOs. I'm using 500mW, and he hasn't spotted me. Sometimes, they aren't *really* QSOs - but in this case it's nowhere near. He hasn't heard me. But there's still a draw here. I've spend the last hour footling around on 160m and have managed a DL. I get far more buzz from hearing an XP...

This particular screenshot is 80m.

The other WSPR frustration is that I have no really neat way of logging this.

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!

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

QRO WSPR ?

Found on the internet:

High power WSPR has caused feedback problems Now turned the wick down to 5 watts. Already been picked up in Germany Lots of noise from switch mode PSUs.

Dear fellow ham,
WSPR stands for Weak Signal Propagation Reporter. It's used with weak signals. With WSPR, you get a long, long way for not very much power. And not very much antenna. String a bit of wire into your garden, set to 500mW and, on say 10 metres at the moment, you will make Australia at the right time of day (morning), and the States in the afternoon.

I hardly ever use more than 1W. I occasionally use 5W because the Long Wire I have won't tune on 160m easily. I use it connected to another rig, which won't go below 5W.

Your Switch mode noise doesn't mean you need to TX with more power. The other end won't see your switch mode PSUs - only theirs. If they're lucky, and they have a low noise floor, then they'll hear your 500mW.

Switch mode noise is a problem for your reception, clearly.

But, serious plea, don't go QRO with WSPR. JT65-HF has, to a certain extent, been spoiled by QRO operators who have discovered that by answering a CQ at high power they can drown out the rest of us. It's disappointing. And it's great to hear the bands when they are quiet and the QRP DX comes back above the noise floor.

Good luck with the noise. And remember, 500mW is plenty.

160 metres

I improved my antenna system this afternoon - I've now got a much longer long wire which is a bit higher - I can't quite touch the apex. I'm still using 500mW/817/T1 tuner, and the XYL's washign line pole as earth, and my DX heard record is S59I at about 1500 km. He hasn't heard me. Best "heard me" is DK6UG at about 900km.

900 km at 500mW on 160m is out of this league for M0DEV. Even with JT65, I'm talking watts, not mW on that band.

160m is worth revisiting. But I do want to get my head around whether "watts per km" is sensible. I suspect it's not.

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?

Why WSPR is so interesting

I'm beginning to realise why a lot of us post WSPR screenshots. Basically, WSPR breaks all the rules that you and I have been taught about dx, antenna systems and power.

When I read the received wisdom about "DXing", it tells me that I need to have a Very High Antenna. My RF-oriented friends will tell me that I need to use Power

I know we're on the top of a sunspot cycle, but regular readers will realise that I am deliberately hobbling myself here: my WSPR 10m setup is an 817 running 500 mW, and a bit (I mean a bit) of wire, draped carelessly over a shed end, with a few metres in free space. It gets up about 2.5m at the highest point.

Hence my surprise this morning to discover, after its first TX cycle, that VK2UB is hearing me. I am, well, gobsmacked. VK2UB is on the eastern edge of Australia, 16,800 km from M0DEV.

One of the things WSPR is teaching me is that propagation matters far more than I ever thought before. When a band is "open", there is absolutely no need for Power. QRM apart, the connections just work, like VK2UB above, and a session on 2m with G4VXE a few days ago, when milliwatts did 140km on 2m. When it's closed, it's closed.

I'm almost thinking of "Power" as trying to force something that isn't going to go. It's not really a solution.

I think that's an argument for QRP. Oh, and a nice email from eqsl to tell me that they have enabled JT9 as a mode :-)

500mW WSPR

I said to myself, when I started this blog, that i wasn't going to start posting WSPR (or PSKR) maps showing how well I'm doing. So I'm not going to post the map, or anything. For one thing, it's probably not very good in comparison to many

I am running a pretty minimal setup here. The 817 is on 500mW, as low as it will go without gadgetry. The "antenna" is a random piece of wire of unknown length I found coiled up in the garage. The only concession I made recently was to lift the wire out of the gutter and position it in the air, with the help of a pole at the far end. I'm running this sophisticated piece of wizardry through an Elecraft T1 automatic ATU. There is no balun. The other half is connected to an earth stake, part of the more sophisticated end of the shack. If you ask any radio-aware friends how good this setup would be for DX, I think they'd probably choke with laughter

So, it's been running since about 8AM this morning. I have heard VE3KYK (5400km), VA3ZLT (5500 km) and UT7GH (2600km). And I'm hearing AG0T at 6300km

But I award myself the DX prize for a two-way WSPR with K5CGM (7100 km, in Jenks, OK). Shame they can't be QSLd....

VHF JT65

Tim, G4VXE, and I had a short session this afternoon with JT65 on 2m, using the JT65-HF program, just because we both had it configured.

We started out on 144.165.000 using 10W each, into a collinear at each end. My collinear, just so you get the picture, is screwed to a shed wall. I can touch the bottom of it. The copy was, by HF standards, astoundingly easy - we exchanged -05 (him at my end) and -09. Tim dropped to 1W, and I still had very easy copy at this end, well above the noise floor.

A back of an envelope calculation suggested that we'd hit -24dB at 150mW. This is over 140 km, with "poor" aerials. I can't get that low with any of my kit - pout!

There is a lot of mileage to JT65 and its siblings on VHF. I'd like to try this on 23cm

VHF WSPR

During that interlude of "poor" propagation yesterday I decided to have a go at setting WSPR up on 2m.

The tricky bit was finding the agreed frequency. After a bit of searching, 144.489.000 seemed to be the agreed one (WSPR itself told me a dial of 144.488.000....)

Set it up and left it, and was very pleased to see G4VXE pop up, both ways

The intriguing thing here is that if you look at his screenshot of the same QSO here, you'll see that I am at the top of his passband, whereas Tim is at the bottom of mine. Somewhere or other, there's a discrepancy of around 100Hz (I was TXing around 500). I suppose that's not too bad for uncalibrated rigs at VHF, but it is a bit disconcerting. Mine is an almost new TS-2000. Wonder what Tim was using?

I will certainly be on 144.489 dial using WSPR again. Will you join me?

"poor"

The propagation tools all describe band conditions today as "poor", and most people seem to have taken heed and disappeared to polish their antennas, or some other diversionary activity.

I turned WSPR on, on 40 metres, and picked up a couple of stations running 50 mW beacons - DL1FX and EA6FG, both pretty regularly throughout the afternoon.

I often intend to drop power but forget - once one beacon has gone off at 2.5W (my normal power) there's no real point in dropping it. Dropping the 817 to 500mW will have to happen soon, just to see what 500mW and a bit of wire in a gutter can really do!

JT65 on 20 metres was eerily quiet. But through the murk, a Taiwanese station closing with a Thai station, then a BX (mainland China) working someone else. I guess this DX would normally be drowned out by the cacophony of QRO European operations. I didn't manage to work them, but was pleased to see them

On a slightly different tack, I worked someone on JT9-1 last night. The conversation went thus at the start:

CQ M0DEV IO82
M0DEV G1AAA XX00 (I've changed the callsign)
G1AAA M0DEV -07
M0DEV G1AAA -10
Now ok, he's missed acknowledging my report, but he's sent a report. Maybe he just clicked the wrong text to send.

G1AAA M0DEV RRR
MY REPORT PSE?
What? Sorry?

I sent the report several times, and the reply was REPORT PSE
and finally RRRRR 73 73


So, I think we're in the bag. An email arrived from him this morning to ask why I never sent a report. He claims I was sending "G1AAA M0DEV"...with no digits on the end.

If you can work out how that happened, I'd love to hear it.

The exchange also underlines the importance of sticking exactly to the agreed protocol when we can't have a proper conversation. If he didn't get my original report, he should have pushed on with

M0DEV G1AAA XX00
until he got it.

20 metres WSPR

I left WSPR running on 20 metres whilst flitting in and out of the shack today. It's been on for about 6 hours, and this is a cumulative plot.

Running 2.5 watts out of the ft-817 to what is probably the world's worst antenna - a piece of wire running along some guttering about 2.5m up. With an earth, admittedly. The Elecraft T1 tunes it easily, but I am astonished at how well the 2.5W has got out. It turns out, i think, to be a better TX than RX antenna - a number of these stations can hear me, and only a few are heard by me but don't hear me.

By far the best DX here is RA0SX, who hears me but I can't hear him.

So why do we use such high power? I think there's an element of beat the competition. And, of course, nearly every mode will be much less efficient than WSPR.

The Bear Garden: 20m JT65

I've continued to play with QRP on digital modes, and elected to try 20 metres JT65 this morning, whilst it was fairly quiet. Bear in mind this is QRP not qrp - I am using a piece of wire draped over a drainpipe, not low power to a beam antenna

Here's the picture after fifteen minutes of operating at 2.5W on the 817 - so about 2W, by the time it reaches the drainpipe.

- which is encouraging!

My 2.5W has made it to North and South America, Japan and most of Europe.

Completing a QSO was a little more involved - there was a QRO RTTY station right in the middle of the range of 14.076. I remembered that my 817 has a Collins filter for CW in which, fortuitously, works in DIG mode and, fortuitously, is almost exactly the right width for a JT65 signal to fit in it. Pop the NAR button, TX, and RU3VQ, just under 3000km away, completed with me. That, because of domestic issues, is the end of this morning's experiment.

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.

QRP /P

I have an FT-817, which has seen hard use with SOTA, which I exhumed for a short break in Cornwall last week. I took a ZM-3 ATU - a manual Z match ATU, which I built a few years ago. And strung up a LW up the side of the house, with a counterpoise. The ZM tuned this quite happily, and it sounded especially perky on 30m. RX. TX was useless. Stations clearly couldn't hear me at all. Do I conclude that QRP operation running <=5W with a poor antenna is a waste of time? Or is it the ZM ATU? I use a LW at the home QTH quite successfully, and have worked VK and other DX easily with it. hmm... ZM-3 reviews
SOTA UK