[Lowfer] SIW and WM received in Georgia

[Jim Davey]

Thanks Mike.  Garry's reception was a welcome event for a couple of
reasons.  Garry and I are old microwave buddies from the Chicago area.  We
used to ragchew on 2304 and 3456 MHz quite regularly when I lived up that
way.  Secondly, I was beginning to get pretty discouraged at the whole
LF/MF reception quest.  When the winter season started, I was plagued by
horrendous line noise, which has subsided considerably lately.  I can
really sympathize with KU4XR.  I use the noise blanker in SpectraVue with
the SDR-IQ and if you adjust the threshold, it works quite well.  Then
when I still wasn't hearing much of anything, I began to question if the
e-probe antenna was a very poor choice for a wooded setting.  I ran some
careful experiments measuring daytime BCB station field strengths back in
December that showed that a long 3m whip I was using up until then worked
far worse when there were trees nearby than a short 0.5m whip which got me
to within a dB or two of theoretical FS.  Three 16" diam trees are located
within a 9-10' radius.  Naturally the question lingered as to whether a
loop would not help in both regards.  So I threw together a 1 sq-m loop of
20 turns, tuned remotely to cover both 136 and 185 kHz bands, so I had
something to compare.  Overall it seems to be much less sensitive to power
line type noise and also seems to give better SNR over the e-probe even
when the noise is not present.  I have to use one of Jay's 2n5109 amps on
this small loop to see a noise rise.

73, Jim K8RZ






On 2/11/15, 12:27 PM, "Michael Sapp" <wa3tts at verizon.net> wrote:

>Nice catch Jim. Your rx system is working quite well !
>
>73, Mike wa3tts
>
>----- Original Message -----
>From: "Jim Davey" <k8rz at etcmail.com>
>To: "Discussion of the Lowfer (US, European, & UK) and MedFer bands"
><lowfer at mailman.qth.net>
>Sent: Wednesday, February 11, 2015 12:02 PM
>Subject: Re: [Lowfer] SIW and WM received in Georgia
>
>
>> I'll post a link to the capture
>>
>> https://www.dropbox.com/s/tes7trqvvr7uoji/loop0050.jpg?dl=0
>>
>> Jim  K8RZ
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On 2/11/15, 11:34 AM, "Garry Hess" <k3siw at sbcglobal.net> wrote:
>>
>>> Just saw a nice capture from Jim, K8RZ showing lowfers WM and SIW.
>>> Distance to SIW is about 556 miles and that's the 21st state for which
>>>a
>>> reception report has been received. Thanks Jim.
>>> -- 
>>> 73, Garry, K3SIW, EN52ta, Elgin, IL
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