Tuesday 9 April 2013

WSPR – A killer tool





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

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

2 comments:

  1. 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.

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  2. Pierre what time of day was that WSPR view? I also wonder how high your dipole was? Very interesting. 73 ZS6RAH

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