I’ve seen a lot of mention recently of WSPR being used by amateur radio stations on various bands. Of particular interest is what seems to be increasing activity outside of the 30m band, the traditional ‘home’ of WSPR.
My rig was tuned to 30m last night so before venturing onto new bands I had a quick refresher course on 30m. I left things running for about 45 minutes, not long I know but this can often yield lots of spots and stations heard. Results last night were disappointing - despite a few moderate to strong traces seen I had no stations decoded at my RX and my signal wasn’t ’spotted’ by any stations (WSPR spots database).
Conditions weren’t great to be fair and sometimes it doesn’t take much differences in signal to noise ratio to make all the difference in the world when it comes to decoding very weak WSPR signals. I know the antenna works kind of OK on 30m though because I worked K5D on that band back in February.
I’ll try again in the next few days and then move on to 40m where I hope to conduct regular tests to gauge how well my antenna works on that band.
Dean Amateur Radio antenna, propagation, WSPR
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WSPR, an acronym for ‘Weak Signal Propagation Reporter’ and pronounced ‘whisper’, is a program written by Joe Taylor (K1JT) that allows radio amateurs around the world to conduct real time propagation tests in conjunction with an online spots reporting database.
I had previously tried WSPR about 6 months ago but with little success at that time. I decided to try again last night on the FT-950 and was pleased to see it worked perfectly. I can’t be sure but I think the FT-950 has something to do with it - the digital filters really help in pulling out the very weak signals that the software is looking for.
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WSPR screenshot
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Part of the appeal of WSPR is that you can have it ‘watch’ a particular band for you (although activity is limited outside of the 30m band) to see what propagation there is to various parts of the world, even as you do other things. You can optionally configure the software to transmit to a pseudo-random schedule, to see where in the world your ‘whispers’ are heard. I have uploaded a few screenshots of the software and the online spots database where you can see how this information is presented (Pictures >> Amateur Radio).
If you would like to read more about WSPR there is a very good write-up on Julian Moss’s (G4ILO) website in his article entitled WSPR - Distant Whispers.
Dean Amateur Radio, Pictures FT-950, propagation, WSPR