[Lf] /6, /12 and radio performance

[hal]

Andre & gang:  you of course realize that /6 has been operating on low power
for the
last few weeks.  Its interesting that it is still being heard despite the
power differences.
Perhaps it will soon be heard Canada as well!     With reduced power the
beacon
hardware does not seem as tricky as with high power, despite the weather
changes
here.  We have about 8 inches of snow covering the ground screen composed of

50 feet by 36 inches of farmers "chicken wire" fence.  The tuning assembly
box is
covered by a smilar amount.   The ground is probably frozen to a depth of a
third
of a meter too.

--Hal

Steve Dove wrote:

> 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
>
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