Hi All
I am monitoring the beacon at Rays QTH
its is great to have a beacon again in the area. Thanks
to Alan GM0USI and Ray GM4CXM and all others who have helped this
project
It is 579 at best when i beam just slightly north of the
direct heading, and can be detected al all points on the compass, being 519 to
529 in most directions
I am also monitoring the frequency.
My transverter is locked to GPS and the Lo is
within 1Hz
The FT847 is not and does drift about a bit
so to measure the frequency I inject a low level 2m signal from a 10MHz GPS
locked sig generator and compare the tones received.
Thus the frequencies I am measuring are probably
no worse that 10Hz out I could get more accurate but that takes some
effort
The beacon drifts slightly with temperature, but
seems to be settling with a lower range observed in the last 24
hours.
Last night at 3am it was on 10368.922,692. this morning
at 08:00z it was on 10368.923,0 it has moved a few Hz lower again as i
write.
There are some rapid step changes of tens of Hz
occasionally and the keying does affect the frequency minutely but in
general the beacon stability is very good.
The most important thing is that it seem to stay well
within a typical receiver SSB bandwidth and with therefore appear on a waterfall
display if you are looking for it.
Over the next few day I will report the maximum
and minimum frequencies I observe and I will be able to then give a more
accurate nominal frequency.
Please spot on beaconspot.eu
I note that one of my spots went to the cluster
and got duplicated, the second 'version' had the last decimal place of
the frequency truncated, apparently shifting the beacon
700Hz!
any one seen that before?
Regards
Mark GM4ISM
