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« on: September 09, 2014, 1350 UTC »
For the past couple weeks I have been getting what might have been a new beacon on 6902.1 kHz at night. The signal has been very weak, right in the noise floor, and really not detectable by ear, mostly I can just tell something is there on the waterfall in Argo. However Saturday night (Sep 6) and again last night (Monday Sep 8 ) it came up nicely out of the noise, and put in quite a good signal for an hour or two each night before fading away again. The night between them, Sunday, the signal was almost undetectable most of the time, with only an occasional dash rising out of the noise floor. The dasher appears to be night only, I have never detected any sign of it before sundown or after sunup. It was well after local dark for me, not just sunset, before it came on. Of course that could be conditions, but based on the way it turned on Saturday night I don’t think so, one moment it was not there, the next it was there S3 or so, and stayed at that signal level until is slowly faded out a couple hours later. Possibly the band going longer caused it to go away for me?
The dashes are about 0.75 sec long and happen every 3.95 seconds. About every 2 minutes there is an CW ID sent “DE DRNK DE DRNK”. At longer intervals there is a longer CW ID sent, it looks like about every 20 minutes or so but I have only caught a couple of them, so not sure yet. The longer ID goes something like “DE DRNK DE DRNK DE DRNK DE DRNK DE DRNK MOJAVE DESERT VB 13.0 VB 13.0 VS 00.0 VS 00.0 TMP 81 TMP 81 U 004 K”.
I have video of the signal that I will put up on YouTube later today.
T!
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