[Lf] /6, /12 and radio performance

[Steve Dove]

Greetings,

Well, great excitement!  (Well, signs of overly sheltered existence,
maybe).

Both /6 and /12 are about as loud as they've ever been here (near
Hershey, PA).  Last night and today they are cresting some 12dB over the
grass,  /12 having an edge of maybe 2 or 3dB over /6  -  a great
improvement for /6.

Initially upon re-assembling the setup after some alleged 'real work',
it was disappointing not to be able to find at least /12.  There were a
couple of almighty spectral spikes out of the displayed window at maybe
30 or 40Hz high and were as such ignored, assumed as being Yet Another
Sprog from something electrically disgusting or other (the 'signatures'
of most of the 'puter switching supplies are individually recognizable
now . . .).  Only something odd was happening;  traces were perceptibly
_leaning_  on the display.  Then it dawned on me that the radio had just
been turned on from cold and what I was seeing was drift.

Drift?

Well, 40Hz warm-up drift means little on SSB or CW, and under 'normal'
circumstances would have no bearing on anything and be considered
meaninglessy good.  In fact, it'd have been 'science fiction' in an
amateur radio of even 20 years ago.  Who would have thought that messing
around at these low frequencies, indeed in the crucible of radio
communication's primordial soup, so to speak, we'd be banging our heads
on the limits on yet another aspect of radio performance?  Oh, good.
Something else to be concerned about.

Those almighty spikes, when I chased them down, were of course the two
beacons.  This is the first time the keying sidebands of  /6  have been
clear;  the long key-down in its sequence allows comparitive strength
comparison with  /12  given a normally narrow bin-width in 'Spectran'.

It's a whole other world looking at a spectral display in comparison to
wearing headphones.  That whole five Hertz between the two beacons now
seems like miles and profligately wasteful.

        73

                Steve        W3EEE  /  G3YDV