[Lowfer] WOLF tonight

[JD]

Tonight's conditions were as different from Sunday night's as night 
and...er, well, another night that's completely not the same.  Little QRM 
and almost no QRN Sunday night with Preamp 1 on, versus S9+20 to +40 tonight 
with the preamps off!  The attached excerpt from Vaisala shows why, although 
I couldn't see lightning in the sky from the field.  For the better part of 
two hours, nothing showed up on WOLF.

Finally, around 0230 I decided I had nothing to lose by playing around a 
little in the WOLF Config tab.  It appeared to be gradually converging on 
plausible carrier frequencies but never quite made it because of its 
automatic restarts, so I wanted to try having it stack more frames, but it 
turns out 32 is apparently the limit. Also, it had been attempting to lock 
onto carrier frequencies as far from center as +0.893 to -0.957 at times, so 
I hoped that reducing the frequency tolerance setting might help confine its 
search to a narrower, more likely band.

After making my changes, I used the front panel button to 'Restart WOLF.'  I 
suspect it did not immediately take my frequency tolerance change at that 
restart, however, although I see that it reverted the time stamp  in the 
decoder output back to the last time the software restarted the decoding 
cycle itself.  Eventually it locked onto a carrier only 49 mHz high, which 
was in the right range given the state of the battery charge at that point, 
so I got my hopes up a little.  Sure enough, the Big WOLF eventually showed 
up three times over the next 22 minutes, in and out of the gibberish.

At the software's next automatic restart at 0327:40, two things happened: 
the decoder time stamp caught up with real time again, and the attempted 
carrier locks all seemed to be in the narrower tolerance that I had 
specified earlier. The latter could have been coincidence, so I'll need to 
observe more and see if I can confirm thaat assertion.

John D


2016-03-01 02:22:58 >WOLF10  -r 11024.559 -f 800 -t 1.0 -w 0.0000 -ut
02:23:22 f:-0.410 a: 1.3 dp: 54.3 ci: 8 cj:188 .YBANPYA*/HIG.F ?
. .  .
02:34:41 >WOLF RESTARTED
02:23:22 f: 0.728 a:-0.5 dp: 70.0 ci:11 cj:285 5TJFT*CO4H3.E7H ?
02:23:46 f: 0.585 a: 0.2 dp: 67.5 ci: 9 cj: 80 AJJVFH9YUI*19C9 ?
. . .
02:50:10 f:-0.957 pm:59.47 jm:858 q: -5.0 -8.9 07085N6K41KG*8P ?
02:51:46 f:-0.957 pm:61.93 jm:858 q: -4.8 -8.0 75KCI*13J70LG K ?
02:53:22 f: 0.049 pm:64.53 jm:476 q: -2.8 -8.2 7WDI4GNB627JDRR ?
02:54:58 f: 0.049 pm:70.08 jm:476 q: -2.5 -9.3 1ME9*4SJ2BN46E5 ?
02:56:34 f: 0.049 pm:74.05 jm:476 q: -2.2 -8.4 4PGC M2UHL8NZJ6 ?
02:58:10 f: 0.049 pm:87.69 jm:476 q: -1.7 -7.2 WC1*G2N2CQKX4.R ?
02:59:46 f: 0.049 pm:94.80 jm:476 q: -1.8 -8.3 /*E997???6K5/I3 ?
03:01:22 f: 0.049 pm:104.3 jm:476 q: -1.6 -8.3 4PGC N8OZPZWACB ?
03:02:58 f: 0.049 pm:121.7 jm:476 q: -1.2 -8.1 4PGC N8OZPZWACB ?
03:04:34 f: 0.049 pm:127.3 jm:476 q: -1.2 -5.9 WD2XES BIG WOLF -
03:06:10 f: 0.049 pm:127.6 jm:476 q: -1.0 -6.0 WD2XES BIG WOLF -
03:07:46 f: 0.049 pm:128.9 jm:476 q: -0.8 -8.7 .000I8PENY30/N6 ?
03:09:22 f: 0.049 pm:131.0 jm:476 q: -0.7 -8.6 X YGAOAX4YZ5KR* ?
03:10:58 f: 0.049 pm:140.5 jm:476 q: -0.6 -7.4 KHQICCTX.???2CX ?
03:12:34 f: 0.049 pm:147.0 jm:476 q: -0.6 -7.5 KHQICCTX.???2CX ?
03:14:10 f: 0.049 pm:155.5 jm:476 q: -0.3 -7.2 J8/Z71 CX*KH2YJ ?
03:15:46 f: 0.049 pm:159.1 jm:476 q: -0.2 -5.8 WD2XES BIG WOLF -
2016-03-01 03:27:40 >WOLF10  -r 11024.559 -f 800 -t 0.2 -w 0.0000 -ut
. . . etc.; no further decodes before QRT . . . 
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