[Lowfer] 6 MHz Canadian Medfers?

[Bill de Carle]

John, Jay, Kurt:

Thanks for the reports.  I know PSK31 isn't very robust but still 
it's kind of amazing that such
a low power signal gets copied some 550 Km away on a band full of 
other unrelated signals as well
as static crashes.  After watching the corrupted but repeating text 
on the screen for a while
the human brain will figure out (guess) what the actual transmitted 
message must be.

One could try other BPSK modes - the beacon box consists of an 
oscillator (at 4x final freq),
EEprom for the bitstream (loadable via a serial port) and timing 
generator with some flexibility
in the clocking options but everything derived from the one epson 
oscillator module running at
a nominal 27,107,200 Hz.  I could upload a WOLF bitstream and run it 
at one of these speeds:
25, 31.25, 50, 100, 200, 400 bps or any of them divided by 10.  That 
means the standard WOLF
decoder software would work, but we'd probably want to run it faster 
for HF.  We used to run
BPSK at MS25 (40 bits per second) quite successfully on HF all those 
years ago.  The box can
generate either BPSK or CW.  You fellas did a lot of work comparing 
the various modes under
many different conditions so not much new to be learned by repeating 
that.  Paul Nicholson's
ebNaut tests are of interest here but probably more suited to VLF or lower.

Thanks also to Warren for the query about the Canadian 6 Mhz band - I 
thought it would be fun
to dig out the old QRP beacon and see if it still worked and if there 
was still any interest.
I'll leave it running for another 24H or longer if someone 
asks.  Wonder if Warren managed
to copy it?

73,
Bill VE2IQ