[Lowfer] TAG back in WOLF Mode

[Lyle Koehler]

John, I'll keep trying, but the New England loopers have been eluding me in
*every* mode this season. Ispired by Roger's outstanding captures earlier
this month, I have run Argo captures for quite a few nights, and the only
identifiable traces were WE and NC. Over the past few days I have recorded
one-hour sessions with CoolEdit at various times of the day. I agree that
the most likely times for good propagation would be a couple of hours before
sunrise, so I have been setting up timed recordings from 0500 to 0600 CST.
So far, the best q values I've seen have been around -4 or -5. Sometimes
that's good enough, but nothing but garbage is printing out. Possibly
there's a faint carrier competing with you on 185.8.

The north-south path has been much more reliable, as evidenced by Lewis'
reception reports of WE. Just for kicks, I have posted a Spectrum Lab "watch
list plot" of WEB, taken a couple of mornings ago, at
http://www.qsl.net/k0lr/web-plot.gif  This gives an interesting picture of
what the amplitude is doing versus time, which is hard to see on the usual
"waterfall" display. The FFT bandwidth is very narrow, probably about the
same as what Argo uses for QRSS30. By the way, I converted the Spectrum Lab
plot to a negative, because I think it's slightly easier to read than the
default colored trace on a black background. WEB's signal looks very strong
from 0600 until almost 0700 CST, but the dots in the final "B" are showing a
fast decline in propagation. You can see from the plot that the signal was
building up during the CW portion of WEB's transmit cycle just before 0600,
although most of the energy is spread outside the narrow FFT bandwidth used
for the plot. The next morning's plot was nearly identical, with somewhat
lower levels but with the same dropoff in signal strength at 0700, about an
hour before local sunrise. On the path from here to New England I would
expect the propagation peak to occur about an hour earlier.

Lyle, K0LR