[Lowfer] eLoran test July 29 - Aug 15

[craig wasson]

My Loran receiver gets a solid signal day or night here in the Martinsburg,
WV area.  The Loran receiver's signal/noise indicator goes from 00 to 99
and at night I get a 99 reading but during the day it drops to a 95 or so
reading - still not bad.  I'm using a random wire antenna on the Loran
receiver - I also have an e-probe antenna, but the random wire seems to
work better.

The e-probe antenna is on my sdr-IQ and visually I see a solid signal over
the 90-110KHz range day or night.    And the Wildwood transmitter shows up
very well for several hours per day on the Loran-C grabber in Nuremberg
that you can find here:
http://www.df6nm.bplaced.net/LoranView/LoranGrabber.htm
I like how that grabber gives you a 10-day history of all of the worldwide
Loran signals.

If you look at the maps from some of the eLoran presentations they seem to
think that 3 transmitter locations will cover the entire USA. Since they
are only trying to do timing, I suppose the reception requirements are
similar to WWVB.   I think that when they synchronize the receiver with the
pulse rate they end up with an effective bandwidth of a fraction of a Hz,
so that probably explains why they don't need a very strong signal.
Earlier tests proved reception of the timing signals from eLoran on the
floor of the New York Stock Exchange using a magnetic loop antenna.  Not
bad for indoors around all of that electronic equipment.

Craig - N6IO


On Sun, Aug 7, 2016 at 6:47 AM, Garry <k3siw at sbcglobal.net> wrote:

> Jim, I use a basic e-probe/SDR-IQ for reception. There are many more,
> improved SDR choices available today. I'm not familiar with the Cloud-IQ
> but with 24 bits that's a good thing. Not good is the lack of an external
> clock input. I've modified one of my SDR-IQs to run off a GPS-locked
> external clock. Perhaps that's not too hard to do for the Cloud-IQ. The
> Cloud-IQ has a TCXO while the SDR-IQ just has an XO. However, I've noticed
> that as long as the SDR-IQ clock is recently calibrated it's quite stable
> when used in a normal hamshack environment. For example, no problem
> decoding Wolf transmissions. Perhaps others will chime in with their
> opinions of what today's best receiver is from a performance/cost viewpoint.
>
> 73, Garry
>
>
>