Experimental grabber moves around a bit

Tonight I will be on 160m, "listening" for G6AVK and who else might be visible.

Grabber URL

It will move around a bit - hence the "experimental".

Experimental QRSS Grabber online

I had some trouble getting Linux running on a newer machine here, so decided to test out my Mac and Win XP running in a VM under Parallels.

Using the FT-817 with a 30m loop antenna, the Grabber is set to monitor the low band QRSS frequency on 40m, 7000.780 - 7000.920 kHz

The software is Spectrum Lab in conjunction with ArgoUpload

The Grabber can be found here , subject to change, updates and possibly extensions to more bands.

Linux QRSS grabber on the way

I just received a bash script for Linux from OZ5AR.

This script looks at the directory where Spectrum Lab puts its capture files, looks if a new file has been saved by SL and uploads it to the website.

The script need a bit of adapting to my needs, but should be tested this week end.

QRSS on 80m

On Monday evening I was watching out for Colin (G6AVK) on 3559.9 kHz

He was transmitting QRSS3 with about 1W out, and propagation was rather poor. but at 2100Z the signal popped up :



... and stayed for about 20 minutes before fading out :




I am using a FT-817 with a 30m circumference loop antenna strung above the rooftop of the apartment building, and fed inside the apartment with 450 ohm air spaced ladder line and a good balanced tuner.

RFI hunting.

I have been doing some RFI hunting today, in order to find some of the noisy switch-mode power supplies in the appartment.

I found a rather noisy one (cheap "universal" laptop supply) with wideband "carriers" every 70 kHz and the noise level dropped considerably when that one was disconnected.

I have been considering replacing as many as possible of the switch-mode PS's with linear regulated ones, because it is far too noisy here, Maybe not worth it, since some neighbours probably have some noisy ones as well.

In any case I am enjoying the little bit more quiet environment here.

It is far from over yet, but a good beginning.

New toy : HF3

I could not resist any more, so got me a new LF/MF/HF receiver, the Target HF3 covering 30kHz - 30MHz

It will take a while to get used to the frequency settings, though I can see why it is made like that.

Otherwise the receiver is simple enough to operate, I used the same method of QRSS calibration as I did for the SW-1, so now it is test receiving the 30m QRSS band.

Just had the 50Hz sidebands in here, stopped a few minutes ago, presumable an OTH radar system.

Mini QRSS system

I am back from a visit to Denmark, and found a nice little setup for watching QRSS.

I was using the Eee 1000H - running SpectrumLab - with a Sony SW-1 receiver (and an audio cable)

Everything can be run from a battery, so no problems with hum.

The SW-1 has AM and SSB reception from 150kHz to 30MHz with 1 kHz steps, so by calibrating with the Russian RWM time signal transmitter I could find the QRSS band on 30m. The SW-1 needs a bit more antenna than the built-in telescopic whip, so a wire antenna was attached to the whip. The SW-1 does have an input jack for an (active) antenna, so that will be tested later. Probably a small tuned loop antenna.

I was not using it a lot, so very few signals were heard. The concept worked well enough, and the frequency drift was not excessive. I set the bandwidth of the "grabber" to 200 Hz, though.

Nice and easy low power portable receiver setup, I may use it at home as well, with external power supply.

Update :

Next step ? : maybe using the Asus Eee4G with linux/WINE, running SpectrumLab - it could hardly get any smaller.

Further, a simple DC-RX - maybe powered by the USB port ?