WSPR on 30m to California

One of the best features of using WSPR is that you don't have to be present for it to work ;o)
It's just a case of setting it up late at night, head off to bed and then when you wake up in the morning, you just look at the WSPR website and check out the fancy maps to see what you heard.

I've listened a few nights recently on 30m but last night seems like it was good for California and the west coast of the USA. I heard 4 stations in total....
K9JM.....5w......I was the only European station to hear him.
AF6ZO...5w.....I was one of 4 in Europe to hear him.
KC6KGE.....5w......I was one of 4 in Europe but seemed to be the most consistent
K7LG......1w........I was the only European to hear him. This was the same as back in 2009.

Considering that I am just using a doublet antenna for receive which is just 4 metres above ground, it's not like I have a better antenna than anyone else in Europe. I presume it must be the location........i.e. the North West of Europe.

Back on WSPR again...

After a long absence, I am back using the digital mode WSPR again on receive. It's a great tool in that you can just leave the rig on one frequency then come back later and see what you have heard. You have the option of uploading what you hear to the WSPR website and a map like the one above can be generated....(Fri afternoon 29th Apr 2011 on 30m).

It's simple to use now that I have it working but there was a lot of messing about initially....downloading the programme again...and then trying to figure out why wasn't it working!

After adjusting microphone levels, ticking the right boxes, etc...it eventually worked. It was great to see the first spot decoded :o) Now all I have to do is rest the microphone on top of the loudspeaker of the HF rig, tune to the right frequency, run the programme and away it goes.

I also have a small 10 inch Netbook PC that I tried last night. No matter what I did with it, all I could see were corrupted callsigns. Even the receive screen on WSPR looked wrong...too many small lines. I tried the internal mic and an external mic...no joy. I have no idea as to why the desktop PC will work fine but the netbook will not.

Anyway, I now hope to use WSPR on 28 MHz for the Summer Sporadic-E season and see what can be heard.

ZL on WSPR on 30 Metres...

Left the rig on overnight on the 18th/19th of July. One of the ususual signals this time was ZL2FT in New Zealand.

Timestamp Call MHz SNR Drift Grid Pwr Reporter RGrid km az

2009-07-19 06:34 ZL2FT 10.140222 -22 0 RF70mb 5 EI7GL IO51tu 18664 10

2009-07-19 06:26 ZL2FT 10.140223 -22 0 RF70mb 5 EI7GL IO51tu 18664 10

2009-07-19 06:16 ZL2FT 10.140223 -21 0 RF70mb 5 EI7GL IO51tu 18664 10

2009-07-19 06:12 ZL2FT 10.140224 -22 0 RF70mb 5 EI7GL IO51tu 18664 10

Looking at the map on the WSPR website, I was the only European station to hear him that morning. Why??

I assume it was a short-path signal over the artic? If so, my take-off in that direction is excellent with the ground to the north here falling away rapidly. Is that the reason? Is it just because I am in the North-West of Europe? Combination of both?

I'm just suprised that I should be the only one in Europe to hear the ZL station when my horizontal antenna is only 4-5 metres above ground, hardly a 'DX' set-up.

WSPR...40m Activity Period - 15th July 2009

The majority of stations using WSPR seem to mainly use 30 metres. In an attempt to encourage more use of other bands, special activity days are organised every week. For this one, I opted to listen on 40 metres and left the rig on receive from early on the 15th to around 08:00 on the 16th.
Using my very low doublet antenna (~5m agl), several European stations running around 1 to 5 watts were heard, nothing special. One notable exception was DL6NL who was running only 50 mW and was heard for the whole day, even at local noon which is probably a sign that the MUF was pretty low.

The following DX was logged...

VE3ODZ (5w)

WB4KLJ (2w)

KE7A (5w) in Texas...consistent signal for ~4-5 hours both mornings.

PY8ELO (20w)

VK6POP (10w)...heard several times on the evening of the 15th. First heard 16:00...several hours before local sunset & several hours before sunrise in VK.

KE0CO (5w) & W7RDP (5w) in Washington state in the NW USA.

2009-07-16 04:34 KE0CO 7.040085 -26 0 CN87tl 5 EI7GL IO51tu 7317 kms

2009-07-16 04:56 W7RDP 7.040073 -23 0 CN87xo 5 EI7GL IO51tu 7291

2009-07-16 04:34 W7RDP 7.040073 -22 0 CN87xo 5 EI7GL IO51tu 7291

Both stations (3 spots in total) were only heard at my local sunrise which was at 04:33. I was suprised to see that I was the only station in Europe to hear them that morning!

The following morning I noticed something similiar on 30 metres where only 2 European stations heard AC7SM in Las Vegas, Nebraska running 5 watts. GM4YJB had one spot at 03:30 and these were my spots...

2009-07-17 05:26 AC7SM 10.140218 -27 0 DM26ie 5 EI7GL IO51tu 7937 39

2009-07-17 03:22 AC7SM 10.140219 -27 0 DM26ie 5 EI7GL IO51tu 7937 39

2009-07-17 03:12 AC7SM 10.140219 -30 0 DM26ie 5 EI7GL IO51tu 7937 39

This time, the 'sunrise' effect was not so obvious....perhaps it is more pronounced on the lower bands like 40 & 80m?

I would have thought that other European stations with better antenna systems would have heard these US stations as well? These initial results would suggest that location is just as important. I must check again on another few mornings to see if something similiar happens again.

Listening on WSPR...

I spent the weekend trying out WSPR......'Weak Signal Propogation Reporter'. It's a new type of mode which was only developed in April 2008 and allows users to detect very weak signals with the soundcard on their PC's. I saw this mentioned on the Soldersmoke Blog recently so I downloaded the software.

It basically works as follows.....

1) You tune to a specific frequency on each band. On 30 metres, the most popular band for these kind of signals, you set your rig to 10.138700 MHz on USB.

2) The software listens to the received audio from 1.4 to 1.6 khz. This equates to 10.140100 to 10.140200, a 200 Hz wide section of spectrum.

3) For a basic receive set-up, just put the microphone from your PC next to the loudspeaker of your rig and run the software.

There are a few issues that still need to be resolved. You need to set the time on your PC so that it is accurate to within 1 sec. You also need to find out where 10.138700 MHz is! You can't assume that your rig is accurate. I found that on my rig, I had to set it to 10.138778 MHz.

There is a nice short explanation of WSPR on the G4ILO website.

The main website for WSPR reports is WSPR Net which lists all the WSPR spots and can also display them on a map.

The picture above is a screenshot of the WSPR screen. The horizontal waterfall displayat the top shows the signals heard in the 200 Hz band split up into 1 minute segments. In the data section below it, the 2nd column is how far below the noise floor the signal is. The last 3 columns on the right are callsigns heard, their locator square and their power in dBm (20 dBm=0.1 watts, 27dBm=0.5w, 30dBm=1w, 33dBm=2w, 37dBm=5w, 40dBm=10w).

Most stations seem to be running around 1 to 5 watts and over the space of a day, I was hearing signals from both sides of the Atlantic. The activity level seems a little low so perhaps it is still a mode that is only growing? Still, I was suprised at what was heard with the WSPR software digging out signals buried in the noise. Here is a map of what was heard in 30 minutes on a Sunday afternoon in July. Note that the antenna in use was a low doublet antenna only about 4-5 metres above ground level.

As a mode, WSPR has a lot of potential. Some of the advantages might be....

1) You can automatically see if various propogation paths are open although a lack of global receiving stations might make this difficult?

2) Within minutes of sending out a signal, you can see what type of signal you have at various receiving stations.

3) By using very low power, you should be able to see roughly how you are getting out. Then if you make any major antenna changes, you should be able to get instant feedback on your signal strenght?

For anyone interested in very low power operation, this mode has obvious attractions. I tried messing about with QRSS (slow speed CW.....a dot = 3 seconds!) and I found it difficult to find let alone read the signals. WSPR seems to have a lot more potential.

I can feel myself at the edge of a slippery slope with this one ;o)