[Lowfer] Saturday Night at 137 kHz

[us66soft at aol.com]

I was going to title this "Silent Night, Frosty Night" for the sake of 
the holidays.  It was definitely frosty, but it wasn't actually so 
silent.  Lots more static than I was expecting for the middle of night 
at this time of year.

None the less, there were signals.  It was hard to see some of them, 
though, with XKO at least 27 dB above everybody else!!   Argo's signal 
strength numbers weren't showing much difference between MP and XKO, 
but of course that's after the receiver AGC and the external clipping.  
On the radio's S-meter, which appears to be pretty close to the target 
ratio of 6 dB/unit, MP and all other signals on the band were hovering 
about S 2.5 between static crashes.  (Static was frequently above S9, 
but thankfully it was not a continuous roar.)  When XKO was keyed on, 
it was S7 all by itself.

Earlier in the evening I saw traces of what might have been WD2XGJ just 
under Mitch's signal, but I hadn't perfected my Argo settings yet.  By 
the time of the attached capture, I didn't see anything else in that 
slot.

Ultimately, I ended up running four simultaneous instances of Argo.  
Two of the extras helped me watch spectrum above and below the core of 
the watering hole, while one remained centered, but at a much lower 
sensitivity setting.  That's the one I took the attached capture from.  
I am please that during my nap, VO1NA showed up well enough on that 
capture to identify.  Earlier, I was seeing VO1NA on the more sensitive 
Argo instance, but it was so broken up by the proximity to XKO that I 
couldn't tell what it was.  The full ID was really confusing when 
fractured in that way.  Later, when I snagged this capture, it finally 
became clear that it was the full version of NA.

I got my hopes up for a while early in the night over another apparent 
signal, this one about 3 Hz below XKO.  It kept seemingly fading in and 
out, and the keying was clearly cleaner than any of the PLCs that 
sometimes raise my hopes needlessly.  However, it got to looking more 
and more random over time.  Later in the night, another trace showed up 
3 Hz above MP that was "keyed" identically, and then it became obvious 
(from the spacing and from the fact that it appeared more frequently as 
MP gradually got stronger) that those two alleged signals were merely 
mixing products in the clipper.

John
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