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…
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. …
W3SZ RTL Sun Noise Page
This is is followup to our discussion at the MWL just past regarding measuring sun noise / moon noise. The key to getting an accurate measurement is in having sufficient bandwidth of the sampled signal, whether the technique used is…
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…
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….
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…
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,…
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….
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…
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…