I find the comments about QRP PSK interesting
particularly from people with outdoor antennas and
even beams. Try a real challenge that Steve (W3HF) and
I live with -- attic antennas. My goal, watch out for
the next one Steve, is to beat W3HF.

73 Dave WB5NHL (Always 5 watts or less)

---- 070@... wrote:

I find it interesting all the comments made about

QRPers. Both Jay

and Bernie tried it out this contest. Bernie even

made a comment

about gaining some more understanding of (respect

for?) what the

QRPers have to put up with.

FWIW, I have not finished compiling all the results

for the survey,

so there's still time for those of you who have not

sent yours in.

But I do notice a trend with regard to the question

on QRP operation.

About half of the respondents have tried running PSK

QRP. But I think

only one of the respondents runs QRP "most" of the

time, and I know

there's only one who runs QRP all of the time. You

can guess who that

is. :-)

Like Jay AA8QQ, I never saw any traces on 80m,

though I did find two

signals on 40. Never tried 6m, though--the only

antenna for 6 I have

is the 817's rubber duck.

I have worked aurora on cw before and was

wondering if any brave

(foolhearted?) souls have thought to try aurora on

PSK at high

power? (Don't tear me up to bad on this one folks.)

I saw lots of loud/bright sigs out there that my

computer couldn't

make heads nor tails of. It looked like some

strange type of

encryption. I kept getting weird characters where

letters should

have been. Kind of like wrong parity causes on

wired digital

comms.

No tearing here, Jay. I think you answered your own

question. The

problem with aurora is that I believe there is

significant phase

distortion in that propagation. The P in PSK stands

for phase, as it

is the phase of the signal that carries the

information. So

distortion of the phase will destroy the information

in the signal

regardless of the power level.

The best signals for aurora propagation are those

that carry

information in the amplitude of the signal, like CW

and SSB. Anything

with a phase component (PSK, or FM) will be

distorted, often to

unusability. As for the digital modes, maybe MFSK16

would work. It

would certainly be better than PSK, as that too is

an amplitude-based

signal.

What you saw is exactly what Duncan was describing

when he said that

there were many signals he could see, and were loud,

but could not be

decoded. The phase of the signal was shifting faster

than the

receiver could track it, so the bits were being

demodulated in error.

This caused the conversion from bits to letters to

be erroneous. And

this is just like the parity error problem you

compared it to.

Did you happen to notice the phase detector window

on your computer?

If the signal is clean and loud, it should be a

straight vertical

line. A clean but weaker signal will still be

vertical, but just not

as long. If there is distortion, or too much noise,

you will start

seeing lines at other angles--these are bits that

are being

demodulated that are not perfectly clean. The more

of those you see,

the more likely you are to see errors in reception.

Props stunk! I can usually work lots of EU from

here on 5 watts.

Not this

time! Only 2 EU's I heard were DL2AYL and UX0FF.

Agreed. I never heard Erika, though, on any band.

Managed to get Nick

UX0FF once, and did get one EA and one CT. But

nothing else from

central or North Europe.

Oh well, there's always next time.

73,
Steve
W3HF


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