Hello James, OM & LF!

Jim!
We are need that QSO!
Pse make any vertical 5-10m high for rx 40m!
I think it will be good.
Or loop/magnetic loop for 40m band rx!
Prop on 500 is wonderful! Fantastic!
10m high antenna and solid copy in Moscow!
Will be ready to x-band pse.

I'm very interesting to 504 Khz stations.
Some time I copy 539 in Moscow. China or east Russia I think! not RTE!
Do not correlation with the G|GM stations here.

73!
Roman

Dear Laurence, Roman, LF Group,

I shut the beacon down at 0446utc this morning. The frequency was
503.975kHz

as advertised. Thanks for the overnight reports, nice to see spots

from

W1TAG again and from Russia for the first time. I transmitted in about
75%

of the 2 minute periods between about 1940 and 2050utc, but saw

nothing

like

a signal in the BY3 grabber, although the frequency seemed mostly

clear.

Conditions were relatively noisy here with more QRN than the previous
night.

The antenna is a top-loaded vertical with 3 wires in a sort of Y shape
in
the horizontal plane. Where the wires meet, it is supported by a 10m

fibreglass mast. To "jack up" the antenna, I have an old "cherry

picker"

(or

aerial access platform or whatever you wish to call it) which is

slowly

sinking into my lawn. The bottom of the mast is bolted to the cherry
picker

where the operator's basket used to be, so the whole mast can be

raised

into

the air. This allows a total maximum height of about 19m if I am

feeling

brave; last night the middle of the antenna span was raised to about
17m.

Previous FS measurements have shown this gives about 3 - 4dB

improvement

in
ERP due to the increased height and radiation resistance, along with a
slight reduction in loss resistance. The total length of wire in the
antenna

stays the same, but gets further from the ground, so antenna

capacitance

actually reduces slightly. The things we do to try and get a better
signal...

Cross-band QSOs from M0BMU are unfortunately difficult at the moment

due

to
the high QRM levels on the lower HF bands here - I am hoping some work
on
dedicated HF receiving antennas here will improve this soon.

The 504kHz signal seems to be present in many widely-seperated QTHs -
don't

know about W/VE though? It seems to be different at each location.

Here

it

is a rather weak carrier with no audible modulation, on the

spectrogram

it
can be seen to have a couple of stronger spectral lines and several
weaker
ones spread over a range of a few Hz. These seem to vary over time,
possibly

due to QSB. They can't all be RTE/Atlantic 252 harmonics - 504kHz is

an

integer multiple of 9kHz, so many opportunities for internal or

external

intermods due to broadcast stations. 504kHz is also a multiple of

8kHz,

as

is 136kHz - it was suggested at one time that the weak carriers

audible

in
many places on 136.0kHz could be harmonics of the 8kHz clock rate used
in
wired telecomms.

I would be quite interested to try WOLF again - although it needs more
careful coordination with frequencies than WSPR.

Roman, there are some pdf files on the UK 500kHz group site about some
of my
LF/MF gear - you are welcome to use those if you like.

Cheers, Jim Moritz
73 de M0BMU

--
Roman RW3ADB.