International Beacon project

As you probably already have guessed, as a radioamateur I'm very interested in propagations. One of the usefull tools to check if the circumstances are in good shape for a DX, is the International Beacon Project. This worldwide system of HF beacons transmits on 5 bands, 24/7 on a known timing sequence. Every beacon transmit 3 minutes starting it's CW ID in 22wpm, followed by 1 second 100 Watts, 1 second 10 Watts, 1 second 1 Watt, ending with 1 second 100mW. 

For more info about The International Beacon Project, the time schedule and a lot of tools that help you make use of the beacons, take a look at the website of the Northern California DX Foundation.

For a dynamic worldmap showing the actual upcoming transmitions on the several frequencies, take a look at the bottom of the Homepage.

WSPR - first steps

Triggered by an article in one of the ham magazine's, WSPR (pronounced as WhiSPeR) took my attention. This digital mode isn't used to communicate, but developed for doing propagation research. With as little power possible you send and a recieve signals containing your call, grid location and used power in dbM (in my case PD0JDF JO22OI 37). A few moments later you can check the results on an website.

Again the Internet gives you the start by offering much info about the topic. The program used is downloadable here. After installing, setting up your rig and a bit of finetuning in receiving the incoming signals, your on. WSPR is cycling through transmitting 1 or 2 minutes and receiving the next 5 or 6. The received signals appears in the waterfall.  When gathered and undecoded, the results are uploaded onto a database and on the WSPR website you can see the results on a global level. Its very important to have your computerclock at the exact right time, for this purpose are different programs, this one works fine also under Windows 7.

I turned my rig to 14.096500 MHz (20m is my favorite band) and pulled power back to 5 Watts. This is the minimum on my set. After setting the clock, installing the software and hooking things up, nothing happened! After a doublecheck, I realised I just had to be patient. The program was waiting to start at an exact point in time. After a couple of minutes things were going to happen. The program was receiving signals on the 20m band and at the end of the cycle it started to transmit for a minute. This was followed by a period of standby and the cycle started again and again.

After a couple of houres cycling through sending and receiving signals I visited the main WSPR website at http://wsprnet.org/ and pointed direct to the map section filling in my call. What then happened, exceeded my expactations! The map showed als the station who had spotted my signal and uploaded it to the WSPR database! Spots from Canada till Australia with only 5 Watts!

A couple of weeks ago I increased the height of my wire antenna. This was done to lift the antenne between the houses and to increase the upbeam angle. Zooming in on the map to a closer look on Europe, I noticed that the nearby countries were better reachable than before. On 20 meters I didn't had a lot of transmissions with German stations. The map is showing they are now 'in reach' instead of hopped over.

WSPR - I'm sure i'll going to have a lot of fun using it.