Although from the receiving end watching 120s QRSS on 72.4kHz is like
watching grass grow at the transmitting end it turned out to be fairly
exciting.
I had not studied the propagation predictions and I just tagged along with
Laurie. I was late because of a family emergency and I didn't get the
transmitter fired up until 2335, by which time it would seem that main
propagation event had faded.
This was the first time the car battery power supply was used and it proved
much more resilient than the UPS batteries. There was a bit of a panic when
I found that the DDS driver batteries were down to 10v but a quick
connection of a charger resolved this.
My main concern was for the antenna. I managed to improve the antenna
current to 4.5amps and with an antenna feed point of 64ohms this works out
at around 1300watts. With a small suburban antenna the voltage across the
insulators must be enormous. After anxiously inspecting the insulators in
the dark for pyrotechnics all looked well in spite of the heavy rain that
had started to fall. It would seem that the insulator treatment, described
previously, seemed to have done the trick. But there was no chance of
leaving the transmitter on and going to bed as I think Laurie does.
By 0130 no T/A reports had been received and I was ready to pack up.
Fortunately I did a last check of the e-mail and got a report from John,
which encouraged me to leave the transmitter on for a while.
It seems that the propagation followed the familiar pattern of two broad
humps seen so often in Alan's CFH recordings and so a complete 'LDO' was
received in MA.
Many thanks to Jose EA1PX and Markus DF6NM for their reports on frequency
and signal strength.
Most of all, thanks to John Andrews, W1TAG, for his patience in receiving
the signals from Laurie and myself and for making the ARGO recordings
available on his website.
Regards,
Peter, G3LDO
e-mail <[email protected]>
Web <http://web.ukonline.co.uk/g3ldo>
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