[Lowfer] Wednesday in the field.

[us66soft at aol.com]

Got a very late start today, as I discovered I had been kidding myself 
(for an unknown length of time) about my buffer amp being solar 
powered.  The battery pack can apparently power the amp for a very, 
very long time between recharges, because when I went to measure the 
actual solar cell output today...there wasn't any!  Every afternoon 
that i've been using it along with the battery in the field, it 
actually was placing an additional 2 ma drain on the battery in order 
for the blue LED to flash and claim it was "charging."  Unfortunately, 
in the process of discovering that and testing a bigger solar panel, 
the Radio Shack 22-812 DVM inadvertently came across the car's 
accessory outlet while still in current mode, so there was an 
additional delay for fuse replacement.  (The good news is, spare fuses 
are located inside the meter case, so i didn't have to drive 35 miles 
each way this afternoon to buy an immediate replacement.)

The sun was setting as I first began to listen.  HiFER SIW peaked very 
loudly for about three cycles, then faded away into near oblivion for a 
while.  MP had apparently already dipped in level quite a bit.  These 
two, along with NC and USC, still showed up for a while longer, but 
never terribly strong.  I did hear EH and FRC afterward, and even 
captured both in Argo's NDB mode.

Could see that WMS and SIW were present on 1750 meters, but wanted to 
do other things before spending much time with them.  I tried for BR 
and EAR, but neither one were coming in well enough to be sure at that 
point.  Then I went down to 137.78, where MP and VO1NA were both 
already quite good.  I decided to do an extended capture session on 
them, and saw them trade off in strength.  When MP was strong, NA 
wasn't so much, and vice-versa.  In the capture attached, near the end 
of that session, MP ends up being downright messy looking with a 
strongly audible signal.  (This is another one I thought deserved a 
long composite image, but I'm not going to be able to stay awake much 
longer.)

After that, I copied both the Morse and voice IDs of BR.   (Despite 
what Darwin wrote and what therefore appears in the beacon list, the 
voice is LSB, not USB.)   By then, EAR was also coming in more 
consistently, which was especially nice because I hadn't seen more than 
one or two characters at a time out of it for the past week or so..  
And finally, I checked back with WMS (who faded in during mid-S)  and 
SIW at 185.3 for just a little while.  The computer started giving me 
battery warning messages at that points, so it was a very short capture.

John
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: lf30nov.jpg
Type: image/pjpeg
Size: 26638 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://mailman.qth.net/pipermail/lowfer/attachments/20111201/fb1b4bf2/attachment.bin