Return to KLUBNL.PL main page

rsgb_lf_group
[Top] [All Lists]

Re: LF: Re: WSPR does not work

To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: LF: Re: WSPR does not work
From: Wolfgang Büscher <[email protected]>
Date: Sat, 17 Jan 2009 23:56:09 +0100
In-reply-to: <E136C648BAE342AA8374AE1AD09C8028@Black>
References: <F4E8A04C3CBA4C67AE9C3318F2F40C4F@JimPC> <[email protected]> <0F3DBBAC61C545AE85525CD884B642EC@Black> <20090114231729.6b8aea4f@lurcher> <2AD1A31DF27448F495C0CE7FF33CE9DE@Black> <C4F6E432D5814955A1FDD42B0279F472@AGB> <1E6D0A88C4DE49E5A2AF05911187E7A3@Black> <424931F60B3D4F41AB7DCB9E9FCAB3C5@big7368b9a7d3d> <E68E6C5A539A4838ADAC20BE903CBC68@JimPC> <000e01c97703$df2dfcb0$8d01a8c0@JAYDELL> <5E6F6CB3C59741678D3AE19CEA22B373@JimPC> <[email protected]> <008901c9772e$3b16a2f0$8cd9160a@EFREMOV> <[email protected]> <006701c97814$91b188a0$8cd9160a@EFREMOV> <1F4FBFE39AD245A3B4A2DDAA4361BA7C@Black> <003701c97897$39a3f110$8cd9160a@EFREMOV> <5A4D281B4A044457B3A14F908BAB31DD@JimPC> <E136C648BAE342AA8374AE1AD09C8028@Black>
Reply-to: [email protected]
Sender: [email protected]
User-agent: Thunderbird 2.0.0.19 (Windows/20081209)

Hello Markus, Jim, and all,

Markus wrote:

Yesterday I did basically the same experiment using an audio filter, and saw no difference at all in decoding ability between full SSB bandwidth and a 250 Hz filter. I concluded (perhaps prematurely) that there is no blocking effect present.

I do confirm that there is a blocking effect in the WSPR decoder, but I am not really sure about the details...
Today I did another test by injecting an audio carrier from the Speclab generator within 
the WSPR search bandwidth. The "wanted signal" was F5WK signal at 1577 Hz with 
-57 dB below ADC fullscale, displaying -15 dB SNR at the time. I found that at a 1450 Hz 
carrier at -20 dBFS completely blocked decoding, even though the spectrogram traces of 
the WSPR signal and the carrier both looked perfect. Reducing the blocking carrier to -30 
dBFS seemed to reduce Michel's SNR to -20 dB.

In hindsight, and with the information from Jim, I assume that the out-of-band 
interference levels in my first experiment simply have been too small to cause 
an effect. DCF39, the strongest daytime carrier, is attenuated by the SSB IF 
filter edge to about -34 dBFS at originally 3330 Hz, which is then 
downconverted to 2830 Hz for the WSPR computer. So I now also believe that 
decoding might possibly be prevented by a 25 dB larger signal anywhere in the 
audio band.

I guess I will need to play more with this tomorrow.

... similar findings here, but they are difficult to sort out. In the meantime I was able to improve the readability of Jim's and Michel's signal by *carefully* narrowing the IF filter, to give the decoder less out-of-band signal energy to chew on :

2152 -20  0.0   0.137500  0 M0BMU IO91 23
2152 -21  0.1   0.137577  0 F5WK JN18 37
2158 -23 -0.2   0.137500  0 M0BMU IO91 23
2158 -26  0.0   0.137577  0 F5WK JN18 37
 < at this point I modified the filter settings (*) et voila : >
2210 -14 -0.3   0.137500  0 M0BMU IO91 23
2210 -12  0.0   0.137577  0 F5WK JN18 37
2216 -14 -0.1   0.137500  0 M0BMU IO91 23
2216 -11  0.1   0.137577  0 F5WK JN18 37
2222 -11  0.1   0.137577  0 F5WK JN18 37

But drawing any conclusion may be premature - some neighbour may simply have switched off his local QRM generator. My impression is that some processing stages within the WSPR decoder lack dynamic range, or the FFT has significant leakage, or some part of the calculation is done with short integer values (instead of double precision floating point values). The decoder is open source, but lacking any knowledge of the Fortran programming language, I won't try to understand the algorithms.

(*) what I did with the TS850 was switch back to SSB filters in both banks, but use the passband tuning to narrow the frequency range, carefully watching on the broadband spectrogram. The high-pitched tone from DCF and some other, "local" carriers are almost unaudible now, and WSPR seems to be happy about that. Early today, on the club station, the narrow preselector in the LF transverter has done a similar job.

73,
 Wolf DL4YHF  ...-.-



<Prev in Thread] Current Thread [Next in Thread>