SAQ ⁽²⁾

SAQ was received fine here on the 24th December for their Christmas broadcast at 08:00. This was again using the Airspy HF+ Discover and YouLoop in the loft. I had a bit of time to fiddle with settings in SDR# this time, reducign the bandwidth to 100Hz and trying the HF AGC on and off - leaving it on produces better audio but really not much difference between on and off. The signal from SAQ was showing as -100dBFS vs -110dBFS background. Nothing at all received using vlfrx-tools via the UMC204HD + PA0RDT mini whip. That does show the same large peaks above 19kHz but not the one at about 16.5kHz (see above) nor that smaller peak seen at about 21kHz, so no surprise it did not see SAQ. But never mind, it's still useful. The Youtube recording of the event can be seen at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CQZmW_vE00

Very clear reception of the SAQ 100 year anniversary broadcast today, 1st December 2024. This is the first time I received SAQ despite previous attempts. I had two setups running in the hope to at least see something. SDRconnect was running on the Linux box connected via a Heros upconverter and a mini whip in the loft, and SDR# was running on the Windows 10 PC connected to the Airspy HF+ Discovery and a YouLoop antenna in the loft. The YouLoop was oriented towards SAQ at about 62 degrees from here. The mini whip saw nothing but as I mentioned previously it looks to have a serious drop off below about 20kHz. But the Airspy + YouLoop combination worked flawlessly. I saw the carrier appear at aroudn 09:45 UTC as they were switching everything on, followed by a loop of VVV SAQ. Then, at 10:00 UTC came the anniversary broadcast itself begining with CQ de SAQ. It was quite neat to see the gentleman on the key at SAQ and see the morse via the SDR. You can see the morse trail from SAQ on the image above, not a great deal above the noise floor but sufficient to read…