[Lowfer] Who pioneered QRSS?

[John Davis]

>ps  I _actually_ thought my querry would start an argument ...


Well, if you like, I could take credit for it and then we could wait and see
who starts firing back.  :-)

But in reality, it's kind of strange that this early in the QRSS era no one
has actually documented its history.  That's a large oversight on my part,
among other observers and promoters of the mode.

It began as far back as the folks who worked with CCW, I suppose.  I
remember reading comments about how one could theoretically use slower
speeds and integrate over correspondingly longer intervals at the receiver
to increase S/N ratios.

(A thought inspired, no doubt, by the accidental contributions of Slomo
Morse.  Based on that fine piece of work, I hereby appoint W1TAG as my
official biographer.  My own life story is so dull, I doubt whether I myself
could stay awake long enough to read a factual accounting of it.  But in
this mode of authoring, so little research is really necessary--or
desirable--that John ought to be able to wrap up a suitably embellished
version of the story while I am yet alive.  I picture the ending as having
me lost somewhere in the mists of Tibet, or becoming lunch for a pack of
rare African tigers, or something equally exotic, while researching claims
of anomalous propagation out in the wilderness for the scientific betterment
of all mankind.  See what you can do along those lines please, John.)

Anyway:  Later, when waterfall type spectrum analyzer programs started
showing up, it dawned on someone--maybe several someones about the same
time--that integrate-and-dump detection on a coherent signal is not the only
way to achieve narrow bandwidths, and that it could be done with the same
FFT routines that power the waterfall displays as long as the signal is
reasonably stable in frequency.  Weak signal work such as EME was the first
ham application.

Some of the European hams started working with the notion at LF using
software that was available five or six years ago, slowing down
transmissions even further and tweaking to discover what parameters worked
best down here in the Noise Band.  They got such good results that our
current tools such as ON7YD's QRSS at the sending end and Argo at the
receiving end were quickly developed, already customized with appropriate
settings.

Maybe some of the actual parties involved will be able to fill in more
details.  I'm sure Alberto has clearer and more authoritative memories of
the events leading up to his own work, for instance.

73
John