[Lowfer] WEB XR in CT

[Garry Hess]

Jay,

Very impressive captures! I've been seeing WEB here decently but didn't 
tune around the watering hole last night. Instead, I spent some time 
looking for WMS. Best I could do was to identify occasional signal 
traces at 187.490 kHz using QRSS60, slow.

A bit earlier the 518 kHz Navtex RTTY stations in Nuuk, Greenland ($04W) 
and Kodiak, Alaska ($12X) were as good as I've ever seen them (though I 
don't monitor Navtex often). Unfortunately that didn't translate to copy 
of new NDBs in either place. The 5 W, CW signal on 497 kHz from 
WD2XSH/31 in VA was also detected earlier, thanks to QRSS.

WD2XSH/34 has been transmitting PSK31 every 5 minutes on 507.0 kHz this 
weekend to study 500 kHz propagation for emergency communications. 
Although others at about the same distance (434 km) seem to copy 100% 
24/7, I just barely detect the signal during the day though at night 
copy is often 100% here too. The meager daytime reception prompted use 
of decoding programs other than MultiPSK, version 4.10. Dated versions 
of Digipan, CW-Hamscope, MixW2, and MMVari showed no improvement, but 
Digital Master 780, version 4.0, SP4 build 1910 was substantially better 
and has been adopted as my "standard" PSK program. I should note that 
WD2XSH/34 has also run tests using PSK10 and that mode is not included 
in the Digital Master PSK list, but MultiPSK does handle it.

As to the beacon, the word isn't good. Had no luck resonating the 
antenna with additional inductance and instead found forward power peaks 
with minimum variometer inductance rather than maximum. It won't be hard 
to remove inductance but first some repair work is needed on the 
transmitter because the power it delivers to a dummy load is way down. 
That will have to wait awhile as I'm going out of town shortly.

73, Garry, K3SIW, EN52ta, Elgin, IL