19 Jan 2014

40m 5mW Summary

After leaving the 5mW 40m WSPR beacon running for 24 hours, this is the summary.

In all I received 7 spots in that period with the best DX being a single report from Italy and a couple of reports from Denmark.

In all, quite an interesting exercise with very low power.  Clearly  my signal was sitting in the noise most of the time, being just over the noise floor on a few rare occasions for very small number of stations. I am convinced that 2W RF is a better level to aim for in any dedicated WSPR beacon. Even with a 20dB pad in series with the FT817 output, I was still copying stations from near and far including VK6XT on 40m. On TX it was much harder to be copied.
 40m 5mW WSPR spots received
Still, with my modest, low, 40m antenna 1183km is not bad with just 5mW. See later post about 10m results.
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3 comments:

  1. AnonymousMon Jan 20, 10:43:00 am GMT

    I am surprised you got so few spots on 40m with 5mW. When propagation is good (like now) I get several (9) spots with the same transmission.
    My tx is Raspberry Pi, straight out of GPIO port 4 (3.3V square wave) and 2 stages of LPF. Balanced doublet antenna.
    10m with 5mW is more hit-and-miss. Somedays I only get spotted at am grey-line time, other days, I get very strong signals (S/N 0dB!!) out of the blue (Es?).
    Hope the recovery is continuing well.. good to see you on the wspr maps again! Regards, Hugh G6AIG

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  2. Roger G3XBMMon Jan 20, 04:42:00 pm GMT

    I'm not. My 40m antenna is low and compromised.

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  3. PE4BAS, BasMon Jan 20, 08:07:00 pm GMT

    It was very interesting. Unfortenately I didn't spot you at all. I dropped power to 50mW and was still arriving in the US. You spotted me several times. 73, Bas

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