Archives for 2015

WSPR in Action

28th November 2015 By Crawley ARC Leave a Comment

To whet members appetite for the WSPR challenge which the club is running in February I thought I’d set the club station to work and see what can be achieved using this fantastic digital mode. In the spirit of WSPR I used 5W from the K3 as measured on the Expert to a 30m folded dipole, well within Foundation licence conditions. The results are remarkable.

These European stations all heard GX3WSC in a 10 minute period. Not bad. But it doesn’t end there.

Outside Europe in the same 10 minute period we were heard by ZL, JA and well into the US. If that wasn’t good enough take a look at this:

Not one but two ZLs. I’m very disappointed that we weren’t heard in the South Island!

So if that’s what can be achieved in 10 random minutes with 5W and a dipole imagine what is possible in the whole month of February?

Another criticism of WSPR is that it takes nearly 2 minutes to send a signal. Very slow compared to other modes. How many modes though allow your signal to be reported by this number of stations in 2 minutes?

So lets all get our Ultimate kits warmed up and ready for Feb. I’ll be aiming for 30m as it really works day and night around the world.

73 Mike G0KAD

First CARC 2m QSO Outside Europe

6th August 2015 By Crawley ARC Leave a Comment

After a fair bit of work to improve the 2m system in the CARC Shack we’ve managed the first EME QSO outside Europe. Using the 17ele M2 antenna on the main tower with the newly modified PA and a Low Noise (Pre)Amplier (LNA) down in the shack we completed with Joseph, K9MRI in Indiana.

While not audible on the speaker his signal was distinct at -20dB on JT65B. The QSO can been seen below:

You can see from the screen that not everything was in our favour. The degradation was borderline Good/Fair at 2.8 and the moon was at an elevation of 13 degrees which of course is on the edge of the beam of the 5WL M2. The wiggly line around 800Hz is a birdy.

That said Joseph helped a lot by having eight antennas at his end and 1.5KW which makes the difference between his -20dB report and our -22dB report.

K9MRI Antenna (8 x 28ele XP M2)

There’s more to come from the upgrade as the LNA is on bench test before being moved up the mast and of course we still have the 4x8ele LFAs to erect which will mean far more EME opportunities into quieter parts of the sky.

More to follow…..

Mike

G0KAD