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Loggings => HF Beacons => Topic started by: Seamus on November 08, 2009, 1405 UTC

Title: This morning
Post by: Seamus on November 08, 2009, 1405 UTC
Scanned my list this morning, at around 13:30 UTC, and heard a few:


Location: upstate South Carolina
Radio: IC-718
Antenna: 400-foot longwire @ 40 feet (seems to have a strong north-south pattern)

I received some parts yesterday to put up a new antenna, but need to wait for the stores to open today for a couple of pieces that I forgot to order.  This will be a shortened dipole, rather than the "signal magnet" longwire, but it will be oriented in an east-west direction.  Hopefully, it will work to bring in the western beacons a little better.

I'm also expecting two orders of assorted RF and electronic components to arrive early in the week - I wonder what I could make with them.....?
Title: Re: This morning
Post by: beaconman on November 08, 2009, 1419 UTC
Yep PIKE moved down close to 8000 over the night...
it puts out such a good signal that it is not hard to find...
In the day time I always recommend start looking for pike around 8003.6
in the night start dialing up from 8000.2...

Ok is one of my favorite beacons to listen to....but theres a technical reason. hi

Blinky is a good east coast beacon to bad we cant get more east coasters
to get up the guts to put up a beacon...

TS  our newbie is doing well indeed...

3s upon ya

Title: Re: This morning
Post by: Seamus on November 08, 2009, 1451 UTC
Also:

as of 14:35 or so, CO is peeking up through the noise floor here.  Good, solid keying and frequency - no drift or chirp.

There's also a weak carrier in the neighborhood which was doing a very slow, sinuous drift over a range of about 500 Hertz before stabilizing at around 1,000 Hz up from it.  Err...  My mistake - it's still doing it.  It seems to live at that spot at +1,000 but every so often it takes a long, slow "excursion" of +/- a few hundred Hertz, in very smooth curves.  Odd.

(http://www.rthtg.net/beacons/co_and_firend.jpg)

I've seen this carrier there, but I've never actually noticed the curves before...
Title: Re: This morning
Post by: beaconman on November 09, 2009, 0226 UTC
Nice visual on the carrier up aways...
I have always found listening around these beacon interesting...
I have heard lots of stuff from hand sent cw to the number stations and
everything in between...
Title: Re: This morning
Post by: cmradio on November 09, 2009, 0238 UTC
I've seen this carrier there, but I've never actually noticed the curves before...

Could be an appliance or computer whose clock is varying with the power supply load? ???

Peace!
Title: Re: This morning
Post by: Seamus on November 09, 2009, 0256 UTC
If both of us are seeing it, it must be one hellofa big appliance.  Or one common to both of our locations.

Over time, it seemed to be "pinging", on a very long, drawn out timescale - stable for a while, then large excursions falling off to a stable frequency again.  I'll have to see if I can slow down the waterfall far enough that I can capture the cycle, if it does indeed repeat this behavior.
Title: Re: This morning
Post by: Seamus on November 11, 2009, 0333 UTC
Not a whole lot received tonight, but I did notice that carrier up from CO was doing its weird "excursion" thing again (see above), and this time I slowed down the waterfall and caught some images of it:

(http://www.rthtg.net/beacons/excursions.jpg)

The trace is a bit difficult to make out due to the slow sample rate and high noise floor, but you can see that it starts at its usual spot around 1,100 Hz up from CO, wanders around a bit, then settles down again to the same frequency it started from.  CMRadio suggested that it might be an appliance generating the signal, which I guess could be the case, except that its strength seems to vary a lot with time; tonight it wasn't very much above the noise floor.  It's got a very long, slow curve to it, whatever it is, and these shapes only showed up well because I slowed the sampling way down to a fraction of what it was for the image with CO in it, above.  It was running at about three pixels per second, so each of these traces represents maybe three minutes of reception.

Not sure what it is, and I don't think it really has a whole lot of bearing on stuff, but I still found it kind of interesting...