WSPR goes deeper

Very interested to be part of what the software modifier-author calls an 'internal assessment' of the latest JTDX candidate release, which doesn't seem to be publicly available at the moment.

WSPR is the mode receiving attention this time.  A large number of WSPR test files with signals down to an astonishing minus 38dB have been made available for testing.  The current edition of WSJT-X, on which JTDX is based, has a lower limit of -34dB.

It will be interesting to see how this works out under real world conditions.  More particularly, I hope it won't lead to a larger number of false decodes.

Initial testing shows some improvement over the general release JTDX.  There were fairly regular decodes down to -31dB at 10MHz last evening, perhaps more frequently than I've seen with WSJT-X so far.  But there are no decodes down to -34dB and below yet, although those are always scarce, anyway.

We'll see what turns up during listening tests through the week.

[UPDATE: yet another release candidate version has been released just a couple of days later.  This does appear to be returning more signals around the -29 to -30dB mark, but as of yet, nothing that  goes beyond -31dB.  Time will tell if there is any significant improvement in sensitivity over earlier versions and WSJT-X]