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Re: LF: Jason Beacon signals

To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: LF: Jason Beacon signals
From: "James Moritz" <[email protected]>
Date: Fri, 10 Jan 2003 17:47:13 +0000
In-reply-to: <[email protected]>
Reply-to: [email protected]
Sender: <[email protected]>
At 11:28 10/01/2003 -0500, you wrote:
Dear Jim and group,

no criticism intended, but in my opinion machine-decoded modes like Jason or WOLF have one disadvantage for long-haul propagation experiments: They are exclusive, in the sense that potential receivers on the far side can only see one signal at a time, whereas visual modes like QRSS or DFCW allow several stations transmitting side by side.

73 es best of luck
Markus, DF6NM

Dear Markus, LF group,

This is certainly a drawback of current digital modes - but not necessarily so with a "slow" mode like Jason, where the operator can read the received information at a much faster rate than the data is transmitted. In principle at least , you could do this: Digitise a relatively large bandwidth as a .wav file or similar, and store , for the sake of argument, 30 minutes worth of data in memory. Then generate a waterfall display from this data , so that the operator could see the signals present. Then the operator could specify the frequency of a signal of interest, and the demodulation/ decoding DSP algorithm could decode the signal, again using the same data in memory. Having done that, the operator could repeat the procedure with another signal, and so on. Since Jason et al transmit data slowly, and DSP algorithms can run quite fast, it should be possible to receive, store and process several signals simultaneously, and display them sequentially.

Maybe that is a job for some future piece of software - but if you have a few PCs lying around in the shack, there is nothing to stop you doing it now - connect them all to the RX audio output , set one up with a waterfall display to identify signals of interest, then set up the rest running Jason decoders (or other modes, for that matter), so that as soon as a signal is identified, one of the other PCs can be assigned to decode that signal . At the moment, since there is no more than 1 Jason signal most of the time, this would only require 2 PCs, one to monitor the Jason frequency, and one to monitor the QRSS frequencies. The problem would be that the RX bandwidth would have to be wide enough to include 135.9xx kHz, as well as 137.5kHz., so the RX would probably be overloaded if anyone local was QRV in the CW band segment . But that might not be a problem in the USA. An easy solution would be If I transmitted the Jason beacon closer to the "transatlantic" segment, so that all the signals would fit through a CW filter. If anyone would care to try this, and would care to nominate a suitable frequency near 135.9kHz, I could do that now.....

Cheers, Jim Moritz
73 de M0BMU




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