[Lowfer] Lowfer watering hole

[JD]

Been a busy day, so my promised "morning" report on last night's LF is a 
little late.

First, a quick wrap up of 600m.  After capturing XGR/3, I meandered around 
the band and observed Dueling OPERAs, one at 499.43 and one at 499.55 
(actual RF) beeping away simultaneously.  Both were quite strong, so I was 
unable to separate them adequately with any trickery of IF shifting 
available to me on the Kenwood.  Had I remembered to take my new audio notch 
filter to the field, perhaps I could have done something.  Without it, 
though, I can only wonder which one OPERA would have tried to decode?

XSH/7 was booming forth on 467.3 as usual.  Both CW speeds and the PSK31 
segment were perfect copy, even during a slight fade.

I heard (but couldn't identify) faint recurring CW at 480.00 and 480.05, 
both being short transmissions with long spaces between.

The 500 kHz vicinity was relatively quiet here all evening,..just some 
semi-infrequent static crashes.  Up at 13.56 MHz and down at 185 kHz, it was 
a very different story--continuous power line buzz, around S9+30 in AM 
bandwidth, and a solid S9 in CW bandwidth.  No copying LowFERs through that! 
I tuned lower and ran out of the noise, though.  Lightning static was a bit 
more prominent at 137, but I've copied stuff through worse.  Didn't seem to 
be anybody near 137.78, however, and not strong enough signals down at the 
other end of the band to see anything more than a few snippets of QRSS and 
DFCW.

After a while I gave up and tuned lower.  DCF77 was halfway decent by 0445, 
even though static was pretty rough.  It inspired me to spend some time 
playing with CLOCK.exe, but the signal from Germany wasn't adequate to 
decode.  WWVB was, of course.  JJY was barely present at that point on 40 
kHz.  Nothing on 75.0...haven't heard Switzerland in several weeks now. 
Well, with the novelty of that pursuit wearing thin, I got curious about 
decoding France Inter's time signal.  I figured 1750m would still be buried 
in noise, but I tuned up there just for the heck of it, and the noise had 
stopped!  Wonderful signal on 162, but I never could figure out what the 
software wanted in order to decode the information.  Every so often it would 
lock and begin capturing a frame, but it seldom got beyond the "public 
holiday" data  bit.  (Nice of the French to let your clock know when you 
don't have to go to work.)

With 1750 now quiet, about 0554 UTC, I turned to the watering hole, where 
WMS and SIW were strong as usual, even though the recent annoying stray 
carriers were present again, almost right on the same frequencies.  In 
between those two, I got one good clear W from WM, but thereafter, only 
partial characters.  Oddly, the upstrokes of the Ws and Ms showed up more 
often than the downstrokes.  BR could be heard occasionally at the upper end 
of my CW filter's passband.

About 0640 I turned my attention to looking for JAM, with the idea of maybe 
trying for EAR and/or PBO afterward, but before I got more than a few 
minutes into the attempt, the S9+ buzz came back.  So, after a quick trip 
back down to 40 kHz and finding JJY coming in nicely at last, I wimped out, 
shut everything down, and returned home.

Right now I'm headed back to the field, but will probably be too busy with 
earthwork to listen again before dark.

John