[Lowfer] MP off air overnight, plus an Argo peculiarity

[JD]

Sure enough, MP vanished in mid "P" at 10:03 PM CDT (see attached).  Wasn't 
expecting it to go away, but now that I'm back in town, I am glad to see it 
wasn't weather related.  The signal had been bright enough to produce glare 
in the car.  Had to dial in lots of attenuation on the receiver and turn the 
sensitivity way down on Argo.  The regular speed CW ID was plenty strong to 
copy aurally, too, if only my ears could sync up fast enough.

Next I went up to 1750 meters to look for LowFERs.  Couldn't see anyone 
above 185.300, but I was running a second instance of Argo tuned lower, and 
caught SIW at 185.185 (middle trace).  You'll have to take my word for it, 
but there actually was a complete ID including a very solid "W" right after 
what you see in the capture.  More on this in a moment.

After that, I tuned up higher and caught a few idents of EAR (one shown at 
bottom).  The signal wasn't as strong here tonight as a week ago, but 
fortunately there were no stray powerline buzzes to get in the way this 
time.

Now...alas, it appears Argo disappointed me tonight for the first time.  Oh, 
there have been a few occasions when it failed to auto-capture correctly and 
gave me a file with a blank spectrum display in it (that's why I never set 
the capture time to a full screen but only half or less, to reduce the odds 
of losing an entire screen's worth of data).  But tonight's glitch was 
rather more serious--it overwrote an existing file.

The portion of SIW you see attached was auto-captured, and then I manually 
instigated another capture after the W was complete.  I even opened and 
looked at the resulting file to be sure it "took" before I went on to listen 
for EAR.  I also closed the second Argo window.  Made the first capture of 
EAR, then tried another one with different settings, and went into Windows 
Explorer to look at the second EAR capture.  It didn't appear to be there; 
only the first one.  Well, I browsed back to the next earlier file name, and 
strangely, there was the capture I'd just made.  Newer date stamp, but 
earlier file name.  Went back one more file name to look at SIW again, and 
there was the first SIW capture, but not the second one.  After correctly 
writing one capture of EAR, Argo saved the second EAR capture into the file 
that had been the second SIW shot!

It may have some connection to my previously having run two instances of 
Argo without giving them separate "seed" values for the file names, as I 
usually do. But on the other hand, it did save one new file correctly right 
after closing the redundant instance, before making the error.  This glitch 
is undoubtedly rare, but something to be wary of.

John 
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