Well, the clouds were splitting the sky into a half of blue, and a half of grey today. I was stuck at the unmoving boundary of the two, with little warmth this lunchtime.
All the same, it proved a great outing with just 4W from the FT-818. WSPR signals at 1W were hitting +14dB SNR to FY5KE, showing the sheer efficiency of Es propagation.
Another round of waiting for teenagers to return from some crazy activities somewhere led to a brief opportunity to work 17m from the shore this afternoon. Weather continues to be amazingly warm and sunny for the time of year, but with a moderate easterly wind that brought out the windsurfers.
I wondered if I could get JTDX to work on the Raspberry Pi 4B, so downloaded it using the mobile wi-fi. Whilst the version listed for Linux wouldn't work, the version for the Pi 3 did.
One thing to note if you download JTDX for the Pi is that, once installed, you must reboot to see the program listed under 'Sound and Video'.
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| JTDX, up and running on the Pi 4 in the car. |
From then on, it was easy going! No more WSJT-X, which is far less capable than JTDX.
Very happy to be the only station being heard on 17m WSPR by VU3KAZ (1W out), despite the simplicity of my /P station. Of course, with the seawater, the effective signal is known to 'grow' to something between 10 and 25W typically.
Just a shame K2IL started sending FT4 for quite a while, straight on top of ongoing WSPR transmissions. In fairness, after sending him a polite e-mail, he moved a good distance down in frequency within a minute or two.
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| Sun, wind and kite surfers (and a weirdo doing something with a big antenna!) |
I managed 19 FT8 QSOs using 6-8W, spanning the western US to Brazil and Indonesia. Again, very pleasing results with such low power.
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| 6-8W FT8 coverage at 18MHz from the beach. |
