[Lowfer] WOLF tonight

Tue Mar 1 09:36:25 EST 2016

JD,

Interesting. You certainly had a lot more noise to deal with last night. 
My impression of narrowing WOLF's decoder bandwidth is that it's mostly 
a visual thing. WOLF will still play its games of seeming to lock onto 
non-existent signals, albeit with a smaller range of numbers. Nothing 
"real" happens until the SNR on the "real" signal gets high enough. I 
seem to recall Stewart Nelson saying that there was no real gain in 
narrowing the window below 1 Hz. More than likely, your eventual success 
was due to the upside of fading and maybe a little luck with the storms 
that were around last night.

Thanks!

JA

On 3/1/2016 1:46 AM, JD wrote:
> 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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