Due to some local activity with WSPR with a fellow playing
with a Raspberry PI QRP transmitter I decided
to dabble with WSPR again.
The concept of WSPR
beacons and the WSPRnet – Weak Signal Propagation Reporter Network is simply awesome.
http://wsprnet.org/drupal/wsprnet/map
http://wsprnet.org/drupal/wsprnet/map
This is the ideal tool for
any one that has an interest in propagation and possibly even with evaluating the
performance of antennas.
Imagine if the WSPR beacon
had a feature whereby the transmitted data string included a ‘flag’ to indicate
which antenna was selected A or B. The WSPR beacon software then selects
antenna A or B, then sets the ‘flag’. Alternatively the time of transmission
could be a function of the A or B antenna.
Doing some data mining on
the WSPR web site will then reveal the real world performance data to prove the
antenna performance, not some hairy fairy theoretical data which we normally
have to rely on.
The image below shows
propagation paths on 40m. My transmit power was only 5 watts. I see the
majority WSPR beacons run on either 1 watt or 5 watts.
 |
| WSPR 40m with 5 watts and dipole |
I agree with you totally, WSPR is a fantastic propagation tool. More room for data is for sure desirable, but it may also make the signal processing gain smaller, as the redundancy will be less for a given transmission time. But despite this I think I would also like to see a revised WSPR protocol with features like this.
ReplyDeletePierre what time of day was that WSPR view? I also wonder how high your dipole was? Very interesting. 73 ZS6RAH
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