Dear all,
I’m opening this new thread to share with you my experiments and findings with the great WSPRlite I’ve got for my 2017 SOTA Sherpa award.
After a bit of struggling with laptops, I finally managed to communicate with the WSPRlite unit and program it today, so I started testing it with a preliminary transmission on the 20m band with just 200mW output to my random wire endfed antenna in the balcony.
This is what I got from a bit more than 2 hours beacon transmission.
The times on the table are UTC.
Except for one spot from Norway, all the other spots come from North America.
It’s clear that the location, the orientation of the balcony and the antenna set up work great towards North America.
I had left home leaving the WSPRlite connected last evening but once back home, I found that the WSPRlite had stopped transmitting, probably due to a power shortage. Very likely due to excessive consumption when my wife and daughters probably connected everything (oven, kitchen, lights, toaster, microwave, washing machine…) all at the same time, as they often do, despite all my advises and warnings. So the last spot was at 18h04 UTC.
On my return home at about 23h UTC, I put he WSPRlite back on transmission for the whole night and these are the collected spots this morning at 9h40 UTC.
Interestingly I only got a single spot from Italy at 23h14 UTC and nothing else for the whole night until 6h46 UTC, when I got spotted from Bulgaria and then, from that time onwards, several other spots from different locations to the East (Bulgaria, Ukraine, Austria, Hungary, Romania) and the North (Sweden, Denmarc, Scotland) and also in Africa (Canary Is,). As the time passed by, the spots from the East disappeared and turned into spots from Germany and Holland.
The unexpected spot is one from W5 at 9h14 UTC, whose QTH locator is located in the Mexican gulf coast:
In this map, as well as all the spots from tonight and the early morning, we can also see all the North American spots gathered yesterday before the power shut down.
Hi all,
I left the WSPRlite working while connected to my TH5 DX yagi beaming NorthWest in my house at the village SouthWest of Pamplona and I have got hundreds of spots which have produced this very interesting graph showing the times at which the band remains closed:
The following graph shows the spots received after the WSPRlite worked with the 2 following antennas in different locations:
Up to about 19h utc of January 15th with Hy-Gain TH5-DX yagi 15m a.g.l. in QTH IN92CQ. At that point I stopped the WSPRlite.
From about 22h utc of Jan 15th to the end of transmissions at about 13h15 utc of Jan 16th with my random wire endfed in the balcony up abt 25m a.g.l. in QTH IN92ET.
The pattern of night propagation conditions total closure remains the same for the 20m band.
My WSPRlite will run on 30m tonight with the 14m long endfed wire in the balcony up 25m above the street level.
It started TX some minutes ago and this is what I can see so far on http://wsprnet.org/
In my previous post 2 days ago, I told you I had left my WSPRlite connected to my antenna in the balcony, but upon my return home the following day for lunch at 13h utc, I found out that an unexpected event had occurred in the form of XYL accidentaly unplugging the WSPRlite power supply from the mains at about 9h utc.
So I took the WSPRlite with me and I would take it after work to my house in the village South West of Pamplona to leave it transmitting on 30m band to one of the 2 suitable antennas I have there. I would decide right there which one.
An 80m dipole works perfectly on 30m, as 3,5MHz x 3 = 10.5MHz, which is very close to where we are allowed to transmit on 30m band.
I yesterday left my WSPRlite running in the house connected to what I believed it was my 80m band inverted vee bazooka dipole and I returned to the rental appartment in Pamplona, but then I realized of a new unexpected event. I had made a mistake and I had wrongly left the WSPRlite connected to my 40m band bazooka dipole instead of the 80m band one.
Fortunately there wasn’t any risk of damage for the WSPRlite unit because I had previously adjusted my MFJ-986 tuner for perfect 1:1 SWR.
I had already left the house, so the WSPRlite kept running with the 40m band bazooka dipole and this is the graph plotted with the TOP DX spots raised:
I have returned to my house in the village late in the evening today and I finally left the WSPRlite unit working with the 80m band bazooka dipole connected.
The apex is about 14m above the ground and the ends about 5m above the ground.
After the first few minutes transmitting, the difference can already be seen:
This is the graph of the WSPRlite transmitting 200mW on my 80m band inverted vee bazooka dipole. It certainly looks different to that of the previous day with the tuned for 1:1 SWR but still wrong antenna (for 40m).
I left it again working on 30m this evening with a different antenna. This time with a Barker & Williamson BWD-90 inverted vee broadband folded dipole. The apex is again about 14m above the ground and the ends about 5m above the ground.
The predominant direction of both the 80m band bazooka and the BWD-90 antennas is North-South, while that of the 40m band bazooka dipole wrongly used yesterday is East-West.
Starting on April 14th, 2019 at 08h14 utc, these are the original locations of the stations copying my WSPR transmissions on 30m at 200mW up to about 09h00 utc
This is 19h00 utc update. A new spot from North America (N2HQI) can be seen. The spots count is 7 for KD2OM and 2 for N2HQI. It looks like there might be a faint chance for DX S2S on 30m between the two sides of the Pond next April 20th during the Trans.Atlantic S2S event.
Propagation conditions do exist for great DX on 30m. The only problem is that conditions for DX are currently building far too late for most of the activators to remain in a summit.
Personally, I can’t be in a EA2/NV summit after sunset. It’s too cold, too dark, too risky and nasty…
Yes, for what are normally considered “daytime bands” both 20 & 30m have been opening into the evening the last few days. As you say, this is unlikely to help this coming Saturday however as in Europe it’s UTC+2 making these DX windows too late unless an activator is camping overnight on a summit.
This is 05h00 utc update with the full day loop finally closed. Starting a few minutes before 23h utc, we can see up to 10 spots from a station in W7 (KA7OEI-1).
In the graph we can see how the reached distance gets greater between aproximately 21h and 00h30 utc. Band conditions finally close by about 2h30-3h00 utc
A new propagation testing exercise has just started for the 20m band at 19h44 (local) = 17h44 utc.
My WSPRlite has started its transmissions using the same 200mW output power into the same endfed random wire antenna in the balcony about 25m up from the street level, of course, after having tuned it properly for 1:1 SWR with a MFJ ATU.
Things look promissing. After just 15 minutes transmitting, I’ve already got 4 spots from stations in the US East Coast: