Path of 500 foot Beverage On Ground. Feedpoint is at upper right. In the early part of 2018 I installed a 500 foot long Beverage antenna on the ground (BOG), and I have been pleased with its performance. With this antenna, I have been able to receive WSPR spots from Europe, Hawaii, Australia, and …
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630M BOG vs Inverted-L Faceoff
Path of 500 foot Beverage On Ground. Feedpoint is at upper right. In the early part of this year I installed a 500 foot long Beverage antenna on the ground (BOG), and I have been pleased with its performance. With this antenna, I have been able to receive WSPR spots from Europe, Hawaii, Australia, …
W3SZ RTL and RSPduo Sun Noise Page
This is a followup to our October 2018 discussion at the MWL just past regarding measuring sun noise / moon noise. This was originally written on October 7, 2018 and was updated December 15, 2023 with some additional details pertinent to using this method with an ExtIO device other than the RTL ( such as …
Steampunk to the Rescue
I have been having good success with my 630m station performance for both transmit and receive, although as previously mentioned I want to improve my transmit antenna and have plans to do so in short order. I had originally planned to right-off-the-bat optimize the matching of my transmit antenna, but when I installed it I …
Balancing 630m Transmit and Receive Coverage
Above is a map of the WSPR stations that I have received over the past 2 weeks. Because the WSPRnet site map will only display data for up to 24 hours, I used the aprsinfo site to generate this map. You can see in the map above that the aprsinfo site map code has a …
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W3SZ LF Blog – Antenna System Changes and Their Effects
I still have a very basic antenna system here both for Rx and Tx, and I have substantial improvements planned, but even so I have made some improvements that are interesting from a technical standpoint and have also significantly improved transmit capability here. I am still using the 500 foot BOG for receive, and my …
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W3SZ 3-17-18 LF Blog – More Transmit Success, and some Antenna Pecularities
This was a busy week, but I managed to work a few more stations after my first contact with Wayde, K3MF, which I described in the prior blog. Since I worked Wayde, all of my subsequent contacts have been digital, using JT9. On Wednesday I worked John, W3HMS twice, first using FT8 and then using …
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W3SZ 3-11-18 LF Blog – First Transmit Successes on 630m
In a recent blog post I discussed tuning my short 75 foot (15 ft vertical and 60 ft horizontal) Inverted L with my BC306-A variometer. So yesterday I set up a sked and worked K3MF on 473.6 kHz, using CW. Wayde was 599 at my location, and I was 449 at his. I was running …
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Matching the Inverted L on 630m using a WW2 Variometer and a miniVNA Pro
You can barely see the inverted L running between the two towers in the photo above. In a prior blog, I characterized its receive performance, which was worse than a lower and shorter inverted L, and worse than both my 250′ and my 500′ Beverages. Nevertheless, because this inverted L is already in the …
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VHF/UHF/Microwave: Which JT mode should I choose?
I. INTRODUCTION There are 10 Amateur Bands between 50 MHz and 10 GHz inclusive, with widely differing propagation characteristics. There are currently (as of 2-20-18) 5 slow JT modes and 3 fast JT modes, the latter allowing 15 second or shorter receive cycles. Although the program developers categorize FT8 as a slow mode and I …
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