Sunday, May 26, 2019

Italian QRSS beacons heard on 28 MHz - Sat 25th May 2019


The Sporadic-E conditions on 28 MHz on Saturday the 25th of May 2019 were really good with plenty of strong signals on the band. This also meant that very low power signals could be heard as well.

Up around 28.321 to 28.322 MHz, there seems to be a cluster of low power Italian beacons which also give out their ID in very slow morse code i.e. QRSS where one dot is anything from 3 to 6 seconds in length.

DL8WX has a very good beacon list and he has these two on 28.321 MHz...

IZ1KXQ/B 28.32145 JN54AC La Spezia hills "v v v" QRSS-6:"SP", 17s off 100mw inv vee
I3GNQ/B 28.32157 JN56VJ Tencarola, PD 28 s off, QRSS-3: "GB", tx: 2N1711 200mw CB vertical

I heard both of these signals at the same time and they were about 150 Hz apart...


The 'fuzzy' part of the trace is where the beacon was giving out its ID in normal speed morse where as the dots and dashes are the slow QRSS morse part. Each beacon gives out a code for the QRSS part instead of a full call sign.

As can be seen from the time stamp, these are the two signals over a period of about 15 minutes.

Pretty amazing considering they are only 100 and 200 milliwatts.

1 comment:

I3GNQ said...

I am so glad for your report.
The beacon will be active till may 2020 from this location. After ???
If you wont a photo-qsl of beacon send me your address (my is avaible on qrz.com).
I3GNQ Giacomo