[Lowfer] Beacon report

[Garry and Linda Hess]

Just got an RFspace SDR-IQ to play with so beacon monitoring is on the 
back burner at the moment. Did monitor the watering hole over night and 
saw decent signals from CV and occasionally WM came through too. It will 
be great when MP returns. Conditions were good to the west, with several 
Wyoming NDBs coming in well. The real shocker was logging IPA again on 
280 kHz from Easter Island, Chile. That's nearly 7400 miles so LF 
propagation still has life in it.

On the SDR front I quickly discovered that SpectraVue is useless for 
QRSS work. The narrowest filter one can specify is 100 Hz wide. 
Waterfall programs like ARGO, Spectran, etc. are no help because they 
don't respond to USB connections for data input (perhaps someone knows 
of a utility out there that does allow this). The software by G8JCF 
(http://www.g8jcf.dyndns.org/g8jcfsdr/) works with numerous SDR hardware 
but not SDR-IQ. Winrad (http://www.winrad.org/) has support files 
specific to the SDR-IQ but at least on my PC they only spawned endless 
access violations warnings. Perhaps Linrad would work and if so that's 
good incentive to add dual boot capability to my PC. What does work is 
the latest version of Spectrum Laboratory 
(http://freenet-homepage.de/dl4yhf/spectra1.html). That's an 
intimidating package to learn but the incredible flexibility of it makes 
the effort worthwhile. I'd appreciate hearing what others have done to 
get SDR-IQ working usefully at LF.

Thanks and 73,
Garry, K3SIW, EN52ta, Elgin, IL