[Lowfer] The Friday Expedition

[JD]

>>> I fired XNI up on 185.296 at QRS20 to give you something to listen for.

Yup, it's there!

Due to some confusion with keys,* I didn't get set up to listen until almost 
12:20 PM CDT, but caught SIW in the upslope of a W and then the first 
downslope before the changeover at 12:24 PM.  It was quite a good signal 
with QRSS60 despite come occasional sharp pops of lightning static...and 
despite my accidentally having dialed in 20 dB of RF attenuation in transit. 
(In fact, I'm still running 10 dB, with a splendid s/n ratio.  The QRN is 
strong when it is present, but it's not there for very long and there are 
extended quiet gaps, fortunately. Not running the receiver at full gain 
seems to help AGC recovery from those brief pops and crashes.)

After the change, it took about two minutes for the 185.2993 oscillator to 
come up to temperature.  The SIW QRSS signal looked good enough to see at 30 
second Slow speed, so I started an addition instance of Argo to watch it. 
Good thing I did, too.  There was some kind of racket showing up right at 
the very bottom of the QRSS60 screen...which, on the QRSS30 screen, turned 
out to be XNI.  According to Argo, I'm getting 3-4 dB more from it than SIW.

*The confusion with keys also led to the memory stick being left here at the 
house, so I'll have to extract the picture when I get back to the farm.  Our 
predicted sunny day has suddenly turned overcast, so I don't know how much 
more listening I'll get to do.  But if all goes well, I also want to take a 
look at 137.78 in a while.

John