Opera

One of my interests, of which there are far too many for me to ever get anything done, is VLF. I regularly receive the broadcasts from SAQ and having a bit of time after the Christmas holidays and before having to get to grips with the garden ready for spring I downloaded Opera v1.6.5 by EA5HVK of VARA etc. fame. It can be found via https://rosmodem.wordpress.com/

I didn't (yet) find a lot of information but there has been a bit of chatter on the VLF email groups of late and the software basically needed very little setting up - however I am receive only yet so time will tell. Anyway, it installed under Wine on one of the Linux boxes and only offered me the internal soundcard for audio, which is what I needed anyway.

The only antenna I have which is suitable for VLF reception is the YouLoop in the loft. This works well with the Airspy HF+ Discovery and SDR++ on the Mac for reception of SAQ and the plethora of 'interesting' signals down there. So I questioned that Opera would work if I simply piped the audio from SDR++ into the Linux PC - it works with wsjt-x and SSTV programs so why not?

Now I must admit I had no idea if this would even work. Running Opera on the Linux box and setting it to 477kHz with SDR++ on the Mac set similarly to 477kHz, USB I waited. Fortunately someone fairly local started sending beacons. I noticed a trace of slow Morse... the mode Op8 takes 8 minutes to send the beacon and after this up popped the reception details!

The screenshot above does not show the Morse trace so the one below is taken from another beacon reception.

Nice. I will leave it running now to see what it picks up overnight. Given my usual modus operandi is to throw stuff together and read about it some weeks later (!) I have a least this time written some notes for myself. The software reports via pskreporter too.