SAQ RX 2021-12-24
My setup for 2021:(it is made of army stuff, a Ground Plane for 20m)
Used software:
24 december: startup: 07:30 UTC is NL LOC time: 8:30 and TX time: 09:00
Again: no Mini-Whip this time, so my computer was monitoring SAQ on HDSDR, with use of the home brew GP and WebSDR Twente in a browser tab. At the same time in another browser tab I was watching the activity live at the Grimeton station on their Youtube stream, which was well visited.
RF signals on my local SDR rig were received very poor, with a lot of QRM and man made noise. Some CW characters were still audable and readable by ear and could be decoded by the software too.
Okay, I used a much too small antenna in the back yard, in the middle of a town, at the height of 5 mtrs. With no adaption with coils and capacitors for adapting the 14 MHz antenna to the very low frequency of 17.2 kHz it still did a good job. That certainly is not a recepy for good results, I know, I know... but in despite of this all, my experiments succeeded, in my opinion.
Before the end of the transmission, the signal disappeared slowly. Could this be the reason of less TX power because of melting ice on the TX antanna..?
The weaker signal could be seen on the WebSDR as well on my local HDSDR screen and both spectrums showed the same disappearing signal.
On the Youtube stream I could see that the transmission was still going on, so the transmission of CW signals was not ended by that time.
It was nice to have the Morse text in the upper screen of the stream, as a kind of 'live' monitor.
I used it to control and compare te results of the local decoded CW signals here and on the WebSDR screen.
So, on this Christmas Eve morning the SAQ transmisssion started with very strong signals and ended with poor ones. I don't have a controlled scale for receiving signals, but the spectrum of the receiving software shows the signal strength clearly.
Hope to receive the SAQ signal next year again, with by then another setup!
