Day to Night Transition

Just a spectrum I would like to share. It nicely shows the transition from day time propagation to night time propagation.

E-probe experiment (30m)

The Suburban Subharmonic Grabber uses a wider than 100Hz range.
Hence, occasionally a WSPR station makes it into the visual
(displayed) spectrum. When I did my E-probe test, under comparably
poor condx on 30m, RW6XC came up, low enough to nicely be seen
on the grabber spectrum. The interesting part, a visual spectrum
of a single station can be compared to the signal to noise ratio
determined by the WSPR software.

Have a look:
Date: 2009-12-09
Station monitored: RW6XC
Power (indicated): 5W
Distance: LN23AS -> JO22DA = 3059km

UTC...SNR
19:58 -20
19:46 -24
19:38 -20
19:34 -19
19:30 -15
19:26 -14
19:22 -12
19:16 -7
19:12 -8
19:08 -7
19:04 -11
19:02 -12
19:00 -19


The other part of the test was, to see if and how many
station are received by this minimal setup. Remember,
this is an E-probe feeding a homemade direct conversion
receiver...

Stations received during 24h using the E-probe:

Date.......UTC...Call...SNR.Loc...pwr.km.
2009-12-09.17:12.W1XP...-25.FN42fo.5.5546
2009-12-09.19:58.RW6XC..-20.LN23as.5.3059
2009-12-09.10:28.RA3ZSE.-19.KO80ws.5.2313
2009-12-09.13:40.OK2SAM..-9.JN99du.1.1008
2009-12-09.13:46.OE3EV..-12.JN88...5..981
2009-12-09.13:42.IQ4DJ..-12.JN54mq.1..955
2009-12-09.09:50.GM4KGK..+1.IO68ve.5..955
2009-12-09.11:32.OK2BUH..+3.JN89oo.5..945

So, second experiment, yes, you can receive stuff with absolute minimal gear...

80m results (06.12.2009)

Colin and I did some tests on 80m lately. The following spectrum shows the final minutes, before Colin QSYed. Receiver setup on my side: NASA Target HF3 + E-probe. The computer used for analysing is a Packard Bell "dot" netbook with an Intel Atom N270 processor.

The darker regions on the spectrum are due to a local (The Hague) sideband station pulling the AGC to the max. But still, there is some F1A (FSK-CW) coming through... The cheap'n easy setup still allows for detecting weak signals...

30m best of 2009-11-24

The following spectra were taken with an indoors rockloop (magnetic loop made from wire) and my homebrew subharmonic 30m direct conversion receiver (cf. my web-page).

From the awaking of the band to its closing, everything was in, Es short skip, regular skips and even DX (flying W) during daytime, closing finale with grey-line DX.