I've been following with interest recently some of the posts put up by John, EI7GL, concerning reception of the CW beacon on 40.675MHz operated by ZS6WAB.
I kept thinking to myself: 'I should have a go at 40MHz'. Then the reality of getting a system ready for that band kicks in, and I promptly dismissed it as untenable.
 |
| Up and running on 40MHz! |
Then, reading another post from John today, I realised I'd been very stupid: I already have a receiver for the band in the form of the SDRPlay RSP1a! I guess I'd forgotten about that after the pandemic and moving house in the last year or so.
Well, I don't have a directional antenna, but that doesn't necessarily preclude success these days. So, I matched-up the sloping delta, nominally cut for ~10MHz, and found it was very happy to oblige at 1.2:1.
 |
| AA-230 Zoom analyser plot around the centre frequency of 40.675MHz, after ATU matching. |
It's a bit of a shame that ZS6WAB uses CW; I think he may find wider participation if he used WSPR or FT8, because the software is much easier to get going than CW Skimmer, which is now rather long in the tooth, much less user-friendly than WSJT-X or JTDX, and uses rather more computer resources.
No comments:
Post a Comment