Hi Larry,
I had a look for you this morning and saw a interrupted trace popping up
just over the noisefloor. QRN was bad, but I could make a VA out of it
(with some imagination).
I'm pretty sure to have seen your signal and will continue monitoring for
the next days. If condx go up a bit and QRN down a bit I should be able to
get a clear copy.
More general : it seems that it is possible to cross the pond with stations
running less than 1W ERP (believe that BMU and AQC are abt 400-500mW) but
it needs rather long dotlengths (1 minute). So we want to take the next
step to 2-way communication we might need a more 'time efficient' mode than
straight morse code.
DFCW is about 3 times faster but it needs 2 frequencies, a shift of 0.1Hz
would be sufficient. More complicated 'coding' using multiple frequencies
could even speed up things more, using 4 frequencies we could code 64
characters in 3 'dots'.
Based on the experience that a 'very basic' QRSS QSO takes about 20 minutes
at 3 sec. dotlength this would mean over 6 hours at 1 minute dotlength.
With DFCW this could be reduced to about 2 hours, seems acceptable to me.
Advantage of DFCW over more complicated codes is that it is 'readable' on
screen if you know morse code.
73, Rik
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