Wednesday, January 27, 2016

How (good) are your "ears"?

I always imagine that my receive is far better then others. Am I right? The experimental WSPR challenge page from PE1ITR is the site to test it and compare your receive abilities with others. Although the best thing is to compete with a neighbourstation of course as there are a lot of propagation differences between locations. I finally have my old laptop installed with WSPR-X 1.6 and after a few tweaks got it to communicate with the FT-817 and receive something. Transmitting is another story but not important for this experiment.




Running WSPR 24 hours on 26-Jan-2016 on 30m only on receive resulted in a 3rd place with 136 received unique calls.

Distance wise it was place 29.

I think I have to do another experiment using my vertical instead of the horizontal loop. I probabely end better in the distance charts.




Clicking on the blue "uniq's" number you get a nice list from the unique stations heard in order of distance. The times that you spotted a particular station and the power the received station used.


But wait, there is more. You can click on "num. records" and now it gets really interesting. It gives the times when a particular has been spotted. And now we are getting near to a good propagation prediction help. We can actually view the propagation time slots to a particulair area. Combining everything could give a realtime propagation map. Not given are the actual reports, but they can be easily extracted from the database. 

I think PE1ITR and PA3FYM are really on a very good way with this experimental website. 
First intended as a kind of contest or gaming site competing with each other, and yes if you like that would be possible. But I would have some other ideas to work out if they want ideas?

* I would like to see the actual report given to a station in the last table
* I would like a chart to view propagation to different directions (CQ zones for example). Propagation depends on location very much and a personal chart based on received WSPR spots is something I would really appreciate. 

Imagine you switch on your radio and ask yourself in what direction is the best chance of DX at the moment on a band of choice (or all bands). You click on a propagtion chart from you own station (assumed you spotted stations on WSPR) or on the chart from a nearby station and you can instantly view what direction has the best chance. This has nothing to do with sunspots or K and A indexes, no, this would be realtime and would give surprise propagation paths.

Am I too ambitious? Is this something futuristic? I don't think so, if only someone could program this! The amateurradio world would have a great tool!


3 comments:

Paul Stam PAØK said...

Hallo Bas, mijn 'oren' zijn matig. Omgevingsstoring van S9 op 20 m, is overigens wel de enige band met de meeste storing, maar over het algemeen te veel QRM. Ik denk dat jij boft met jouw woonomgeving. Toen ik op Ameland zat verbaasde ik me over de lage bandruis die daar was. Echt fantastisch. Maar dat heb ik hier niet. Ik zit ook 25 meter naast een spoor van de NS. Dus over mijn ontvangst met WSPR maak ik me geen illusies. Voor mij is het belangrijkste waar ik zelf word gespot. 73 Paul

PE4BAS, Bas said...

Hallo Paul, daarom is het ook belangrijk dat er "plaatselijke" conditie peilingen gemaakt worden. Voor jou zal het wat moeilijker zijn dan voor een ander. Betekend wel dat je, zolang je wat ontvangt, er ook een prima propagatie beeld te maken is. Ik weet dat zendamateurs in stedelijke gebieden het gewoon een stuk moeilijker hebben met ontvangst. Dat is gewoon niet te vergelijken met waar ik zit bijvoorbeeld. Toch is het leuk om eens een experiment te doen, zelfs met storing. Er zijn ook apparaatjes te koop (mfj) waar je de storing mee kan onderdrukken. Dan zou je dat met deze site heel goed kunnen testen hoeveel het scheelt. 73, Bas

Paul Stam PAØK said...

Ja, klopt, ik heb er wel eens over nagedacht om dat te doen.