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Re: SV: LF: eclipse

To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: SV: LF: eclipse
From: "Mike Dennison" <[email protected]>
Date: Fri, 6 Aug 1999 12:06:55 +0100
In-reply-to: <[email protected]>
Organization: Radio Society of Great Britain
Reply-to: [email protected]
Sender: <[email protected]>
ON7YD wrote:
>>A software team from the Belgien amateur radio society UBA has developed
>>a programme that can be used to register the fieldstrength measurements.
>>All you need is a PC with Win95/98 and a soundcard. The audio output of
>>the receiver is fed to the input of the soundcard.

Johan wrote:
>AGC (which is present in most amateur receivers) will make such
>measurements almost useless (unless the AGC can be disabled).
>
>Please correct me if I'm wrong...


I now have this software (thanks, Rik for solving my download problem). It is just what I have been looking for as it plots the level of signal, and the noise level if the signal is not permanent. It can run for many hours and produces a small log file compared to the huge Spectrogram ones. An 8-hour overnight plot produced a 1M text file, with each dB measurement dated and timed, plus another file with much less info which is only 9k! I will post some graphs on my web site when I have figured out how to convert the text file into something that Excel can read.

It is obviously optimised for eclipse monitoring, but will be of immense value in monitoring distant LF beacons to discover by more scientific means when the regular enhancements are. This will be especially valuable with that signal from the US which comes up close to 137kHz at night - as this will give us a really good lead as to when a EU/US QSO might be possible (or when to have Spectrogram monitoring for the AMRAD beacon).

Yes, AGC can be a problem, but the program operates fine with the RF gain set well below the AGC threshold, so if the dynamic range required is low there should be no problem.

I recommend anyone interested in LF propagation to download this program - find it at www.uba.be






Mike



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