If you go to my web page at:
http://cafe.rapidus.net/bill1/bbs.htm
down at the bottom of the page you'll find a link you can use to
download a file called QRSS-LEK.ZIP - it has a few seconds of WAV
file snipped from last night's overnight CRUNCH run trying to hear
lowfer LEK.
Although I've copied Lyle before using BPSK, I believe this is the first
time I copied him on CW; the signal came through in the wee hours of the
morning, Wednesday Dec. 6th, 2000. I have Lyle's co-ordinates in
Aitkin MN as 46.53013N, 93.71042W and my QTH in St-Adolphe d'Howard, PQ
Canada is at 45.9351N, 74.2993W. Just re-calculated the distance using
Clarke's ellipsoid: it works out to 1495 Km or 929 miles.
Antenna was a 30 x 20 foot rectangular tuned loop. Rx was a Kenwood
TS850S with external freq standard. Computer was a Compaq laptop
with a 100 Mhz Pentium processor running CRUNCH V3.0. An S16 PCMCIA
soundcard was used for 16-bit audio input. CRUNCH settings were:
40:1 time compression, 800-Hz CW tone out, 300-Hz bandpass filter on
the output. If you have CoolEdit handy you can do a frequency analysis
of this file (select the entire snippet and press the SCAN button) -
it shows Lyle's signal on 800-Hz jutting up just a little over the
smoothed background noise envelope.
If you listen carefully you can just hear Lyle's CW ident in there -
starting about halfway through the audio snippet, you'll hear "LEK"
very distinctly. The signal is weak so you may have to play it over
a few times in LOOP mode before you get it, but it's definitely there.
This is a good example of a signal that seems to come up out of the
noise when you listen to it over and over. It's the equivalent of
the "GRAB" process but done in your head. Pretty neat!
VE2IQ
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