Imabug's journey into electronics and amateur radio as AB4UG and VA6BUG
Continuing on with the previous set of experiments, I left the radio listening to 40m PSK at 7.040 MHz.
40m is a very noisy band here, with a lot of random static and noise bursts across the band that make decoding digimodes more difficult.
Activity during the day was pretty sparse, and most of the stations spotted were in the late afternoon/evening hours (local time). Perhaps not a good day for 40m propagation?
Managed to work another Australian station (VK6WB in Perth, Australia) tonight on 20m PSK using just 35W. According to qrz.com, it’s 18525.7 km away. That’s 1.9 mW/km!
I had to do a double take and wait until he called a couple times to make sure fldigi was decoding it properly. He was as loud as most of the other US stations on the waterfall.
This breaks my previous record for QSO distance (with VK3TDX) by a few thousand km.
Really loving this hobby now.
Like with my previous 10m experiment, I left the radio listening to 20m PSK (14.070 MHz) with fldigi sending the spots to pskreporter.info. Throughout the day, I grabbed screenshots of the map showing the spots at roughly 1-2 hour intervals. From about 2014-02-04 1100Z to 2014-02-05 0149Z (about 15 hours), these are all the stations that were spotted (click for the ginormous version).
There was the usual progression of a few EU stations during the early morning and then lots of US stations throughout the day, moving from east to west. West coast stations were starting to come in pretty well by the time i decided to turn things off. I can usually hear a lot of South American stations when I’m playing PSK, but I guess most of them weren’t transmitting yesterday.
I was also pretty surprised to see that Austrailian station (VK2KM) in there as well (spotted around 2100Z). Wish I was home to try to work it.
You can check out the entire collection of spots over in my Radio Spots album on Google+.
I think these are interesting experiments to do. I think 40m will be the next one. Might also be interesting to let it run overnight to see if the radio hears anything.
As an experiment, I left fldigi running listening for PSK signals on 10m (28.120 MHz) for most of the day to see what could be heard. Fldigi can scan the passband and send the callsigns it finds to pskreporter.info, where it gets displayed on a map. Between about 07:30 and 20:30 (EST) today, this is what fldigi spotted through the antenna and radio
A total of 25 stations sending out PSK signals were spotted by fldigi. The European stations were picked up mostly during the day, with South American stations coming in later on in the afternoon and the smattering of stations out west late afternoon/early evening.
Not as much 10m PSK as I thought I’d see. I know there was more PSK activity throughout the day, but either the radio wasn’t hearing them or fldigi wasn’t spotting them. I think I’ll try this a few more days and see how things go.