Spots, Sunspots and SNOW!

The coming days are due to be pretty quiet, weather wise, although some very rare snowfall has been taking place over night.

A rare sight on Anglesey.

Even rarer than snow these days is a decent sunspot.  A group of spots has just come into view!

Over the weekend, I set up a full-sized 30m vertical I used for Marconi Day WSPR beaconing from Cefn Du, near Caernarfon last year, and which has languished in a plastic bag ever since! 

The site is my 'bolthole' at a local marsh, which proved to be exceptionally good for 40m WSPR.

This is how the past 24 hours have gone in terms of range, and in comparison with a G7 station, who runs a very effective inverted-L, and one of the best on many bands using WSPR:

Clearly, the vertical is doing very well indeed, more especially during the depths of night.

Across all distances, my vertical is just over 4.5dB stronger than the inverted-L.  For brevity, I haven't included the comparison only at DX distances.  But the summary is 6.75dB stronger for distances above 4400km, and 10.5dB stronger at the extreme DX distances. 

Of course, the comparison graph is not the be-all-and-end-all of the story.  That graph only includes stations reporting both transmitter stations.  It doesn't include those spots where only one transmitter was heard.  That information is more important, because being heard is much better than not being heard!

As you can see, there is a large number of DX that did not hear the inverted-L at all.  DP0GVN was hearing me at a robust peak S/N of -14dB, whilst VK5MR and VU3KAZ both heard me at a much more marginal -26dB.  

Again, the marsh site is proving to be an exceptionally good location from which to operate.  

Of course, I have to always sound a cautionary note about too many WSPRlite transmitters and too few receivers being a bad thing.  But, equally, I also have to underline just how important WSPR is as an objective, bias-free means of assessing and comparing antenna performance.  It's a pity that the so-called representative bodies for amateur radio do not see the obvious merit in giving WSPR transmissions the kind of band allocation and protection that beacons enjoy.  Instead, we regularly have to put up with licence-breaching infringements of our existing transmissions from, mainly, RTTY and PACTOR. 

Yet again, the retired middle class, white men sitting on committees are failing to keep up with the times, and their legitimacy must be called into question.