Furlough 40 Hears the World

I'm still working on tuning up the transmit side of the transceiver to see if I can get a little closer to designer N6QW, Pete Juliano's 5 watt specification, but in the meantime I decided to checkout the performance of the receiver.

I ran a weak signal propagation receive test overnight to see how well the receiver is working.  The image all the stations I heard over about 12 hours.  I'm located in Northern Virginia, just outside of Washington DC and I heard stations from Australia and New Zealand. This is a pretty sensitive receiver! Kudo's to Pete for the terrific design.

If you haven’t checked out WSPR,  it is one of the digital modes that I like.  It uses signal processing software from Nobel Prize winning Princeton physicist Joe Taylor.  It is a great way to analyze your station’s reach both in receive and transmit.

The software is available here - https://physics.princeton.edu/pulsar/K1JT/wsjtx.html 

The same software also supports FT8 and other weak signal digital modes. 

The only thing I needed to do to use the software on receive was plug the rig’s phone output into the mic input on the laptop and tune the rig to the 40 meter WSPR frequency on upper side band.  The software does all the work.  Its time based, so you PC’s clock needs to be sync’d pretty close to internet time. 

All stations that run WSPR have the option of uploading the signals they hear to WSPRnet.org, and the WSPRnet database is open and searchable.   The web site I used to produce the map is at http://wspr.vk7jj.com/.  If you use WSPR you should check it out - this is just one of many tools to allow to check your rig's performance,  test new antennas, and so on.  I let WSPR run in receive mode over night and looked at the results this morning.

In order to test how well I am getting out on transmit I need to get some sort of keying control built for the rig – either through integrating CAT control into my Arduino control program – or using serial port keying through a USB interface.  So, in addition to tuning up the transmit circuits, this will be one of my next projects.

73 from Great Falls

Dean

KK4DAS