Hi Ed,
I just put my QRSS kit from Hans Summers on the air a couple of days ago and would appreciate hearing of any "sightings" of my signal.
Great job on finishing the kit and getting it on air. Don't forget Steve G0XAR! He and I produced this kit collaboratively and equally! At Dayton I was just the smiley face of QRSS Labs kit sales :-D
What are the "various online grabbers" referenced in the QRSS Beacon Kit? Are these people, websites, software...?
Websites. People who set up their computer and an Argo screen, and hook it up to a website so that what their receiver/Argo sees is updated to a web page every few minutes. There is a QRSS Grabber compendium site at . I don't know if this has links to ALL the grabbers around, but I think it is fairly comprehensive. It allows you to instantly shrunken versions fo the screens, and if you want to see any in detail, follow the link to the grabber website. Not all the grabbers are online all the time.
Nice! I see you! Very clear, right now as of 12:00 GMT (13:00 BST here in London, 08:00 EST) I see your signal on the grabber of W1BW at . Your signal looks to be on 10,140,029 / 135 as you predicted. Your FSK is about 6Hz which is marginally on the wide side, you might want to trim that "gimmick" capacitor slightly to get it down to 4 or 5Hz. But no big deal.
Just in case the path to W1BW isn't still there when you read this, I took a copy of the current image and stored it on the group photos, see:
. It seemed to get shrunk a bit in the Yahoo-isation process. But if you want, I can send it to you direct via email.
Bruce W1BW is in Concord, MA (FN42HL). According to my calculations, that's 849 miles from your location. Congratulations!
Conditions seem not too great on 30m at the moment. QRSS is all about patience too ;-) But certainly this little beacon kit is well capable of worldwide results. Check out my pages:
(Caribbean holiday)
(Turkey holiday)
and look at the map of receiving stations etc. All of that was with this exact same circuit, which later became the kit (without modifications from my original). I used a basic wire dipole antenna, with balun at the centre and 5m of RG58 coax direct to the beacon output. No attempts at tuning the antenna e.g. trimming bits of wire off it until it resonated perfectly. None of that. Just my whole low-tech approach to radio!
0.000073 de Hans G0UPL
