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[w8lv at arrl.net]

amrad...

William John Pietschman (W8LV) has sent you a forum message for you to review.


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whats going on with efforts to get a USA ham allocation from 160-180? I'd sure like to do more than just listen there....

73's DE BILL W8LV

Forum: HomeBrew
Subject: W8LV's 2002 ELF setup...

Note: This was our setup in 2002 to receive ELF. Since then, we have made a slight modification...we replaced the 2001 white Buick Century...with a 2005 white Buick Century.

Who else is listening to ELF out there? We would love to hear from you as to what you are up to!

-W8LV DE BILL

We have come up with a portable ELF/ULF mobile station setup. We use the WR-3 receiver (source listed in the recommended link above for the WR-3, a very good receiver!)and use a 10 metre band magnetic mount antenna placed on the trunk of a 2001 Buick 4 door sedan. We attach a ground wire to the WR-3 by means of a stub that we mounted on the case of the WR-3 (the case is 'ground')This we ground to the car by means of a wire with alligator clip, connected to a bolt located underneath the passenger seat, and we leave this wire in the car rolled up underneath the seat so that we can unroll it and connect it to the WR-3 whenever we want to. (We found that when we attempted to use the coax shield and not use a wire grounded to the case of the WR-3 we didn't seem to have anough capacity from the magentic antenna,attached to the trunk of the car to get a good circuit) We bring in the coax from the ten-meter band antenna through a back window of the car. Please note that the band of t
 his antenna is irrevalent, we are simply using it to replace the WR-3 whip antenna for this mobile setting, any handy antenna would do, so long as it doesn't have lossy traps or capacators/coils of any kind, or you can I am sure remove these things should you happpen to find them on whatever antenna you may have (or jump around them/short them...we do appreciate that our antenna is not fibreglass, but stainless steel, this means that at some future date we can attach an alligator clip to the stainless steel whip for other experiments. Forget that for the WR-3, though, it just overloads the front end circuit-but if you are like my son and I, poor experimenters, you use all of this equipment for yet other radio experiments not yet thought of--if you have fiberglass, then you can't do that....)We place a towel in the window, to protect the coax wire and the window. The window is gently closed to make a seal. The child-proof switch is activated that is located in the drivers sea
 t door. This is a switch that is to keep children from activating the window (for safety). Activating this switch keeps us from accidently pressing the window switch ourselves! The shield of the coax is cut and sealed off with bathtub sealer, so that the coax shield is not used, only the center wire of the coax is what we are interested in. The other end of the coax has a PL-to-BNC adaptor, so as to plug in the WR-3's antenna input. We use a nine volt battery to power the WR-3, as this will last for many, many hours, so many that it is really irrevalent to bother with a 12-to9 volt conversion that would allow us to use the cars power supply ciragette lighter connection, as this might also increase our noise level (noise form the car itself) so this eliminates somewhat such potential problems I think. We find that this setup is reasonably quiet in respect to engine and auto computer noise. When stationary with the car shut off, it is superb. We can drive around, and my son us
 es headphones to monitor the band, or we use a cassette adaptor, and play the sound through the cars speaker system (with the volume somewhat down). We can then easily find good "hotspots" where we can monitor the dawn chorus, for example. We also find that there are 'sweet spots' even in urban settings where we can hear the signals quite well, and these 'sweet spots' seem to persist from year to year! Noise e-fields are also interesting to detect. For example, if the 'wind' passes by our stationary position from a passing automobile or truck, we can hear the sound, and this does NOT seem to be microphonic, indeed, we believe that we are detecting the static field generated by the moving vehicle, relative to our stationary position! We have also used two large screwdrivers, attached two wires to clamps and placed these in the ground, and attached these to the WR-3 by means of a BNC connector (remember that the tires are insulating you from the ground). I tried this
  out on a farmers field, and this gives very strange sounds. They are cyclical and very different from what you hear with the modified magnetic antenna stuck on the trunk of the Buick! I don't know what I am hearing, maybe some sort of navagation system is what I suspect. Also, it is very handy I have found to have identification and carry your amateur radio license if you try this in a state park late at night, (even though this is not required) now that we are in wartime, cars set up as monitoring posts connected to wires stuck in the ground connected to strange electrical equipment are best explained this way. Also, in potential crime areas, you definately do NOT want to appear that you are some sort of monitoring post! (Think about it!)
If anyone else is out there doing mobile/portable low frequency experiments, please let us know about your experiments!
Also, remember we use 12 volt negative ground auto system here in the US, but I understand that there are some other polarities/voltages used.
73,
DE W8LV BILL

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