[Lowfer] Squiggles in the Wheat Field

[Bill Ashlock]

JD,

Thanks for all your efforts to capture that Wm graphic of mine.. at only a half-power. I'm still in Andover but some time tomorrow I should be able bring it up to Parr. So keep watching... and don't freeze to death :)  BTW what is the distance between us?

73

Bill

From: listread at lwca.org
To: lowfer at mailman.qth.net
Date: Wed, 4 Jan 2012 02:56:08 -0600
Subject: [Lowfer] Squiggles in the Wheat Field

Didn't plan to go out to the field tonight, as I wanted to catch up on 
sleep...and the next two nights are supposed to be warmer anyway.  However, 
circumstances change, and it turns out I'll need to be up early the next 
several mornings.  So, tonight may be my last chance to monitor until next 
week.
 
On one hand, I'm glad for the change in plans, because I managed to catch 
two new stations (for me) on 1750 meters.  On the other hand, they also came 
at the cost of a certain amount of frustration.
 
The view shown here captures WMS and WM on the same screen.  I'm very happy 
with it, but I was even happier with the three views I caught about two 
hours earlier, after giving up on transatlantic activity for the night.  The 
earlier captures between 10:30 PM and midnight CST showed just the apexes of 
the W and Ms at first, all pale and barely visible.  Then, gradually, the 
slanted lines filled in to form whole letters.  Above them, WMS was strong 
and unfading.
 
But you'll have to take my word for it.  A quirk of using multiple Argo 
sessions that I mentioned a few months ago showed up again and wiped out 
those captures.
 
This time, I know more or less _what_ went wrong, although I'm still not 
clear on why.  Argo seems to write settings to the registry mainly when it 
closes, so I have generally been able to give each instance of Argo its own 
"seed" values for autocapture filenames, without appreciable interaction.  I 
give Instance One a seed value like "03Jan" and Instance Two the seed 
"03Jan-b" (and "-c" and so on for any additional instances on the same day). 
But somehow, tonight, both instances ended up with the same seed value and 
started counting numbers from the same point as well.  Result: Instance 1 
captured WMS and WM as "03Jan00000.bmp" and all was well.  But then, eight 
seconds later, Instance 2 snapped its screen showing SIW on 185.185...and 
saved it as "03Jan00000.bmp" too, right over the previous capture!  They 
repeated that action over and over during the whole hour and a half I was 
tuned to the watering hole, which I discovered only AFTER tuning up to try 
for SJ (next post).
 
So, I hung around for two more hours in the increasing chill to wait for WM 
to be strong enough again to catch this view.  The teeth were chattering, 
but the result warmed my heart--if not the rest of me.
 
John 

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