Thursday, September 11, 2014
Peering into the Noise
A large aspect of working DX is being in the right place at the right time. TY1AA in Benin came up on 30M this afternoon at 1936Z (15:36 local). 30M at this time of day and this time of year is very much like 40M, noisy as heck. Here is a shot of daytime 30M with the noise blanker off
Note the bright green waterfall and the S meter. You aren't hearing Benin through that! Here is a shot with the NB on.
A clear 12 dBm improvement. Increasing selectivity to 25hz bandwidth further improves S/N by 20 dBm compared to no noise blanker.
Copying at 25hz however requires being dead on in terms of freq.
I still can only copy the Benin station only occasionally but I expect he will build as nightfall progresses
Spot Collector in DX labs gives some clue to the pileup
This reporting station states he worked TY1AA "up 2" So I look at the panadadapter/waterfall and sure enought you can make out a pileup about 2khz wide
This is confirmed on skimmerfall
You can just make out about signals about 2 khz wide almost perfect bookends. As I write this I can hear the Benin station continue to build. Before he was nonexistent now he is 3/3, its 20:36Z
The latest spot collector report is
and
So I'm going to start mashing the key with my measly 200W and see what happens
Update: 9-12-2014 After all that I was never able to get him. He was working a wall of Japanese and almost no USA. Today I flipped on 17M and using skimmer had him in the log in 3 calls (less than 5 minutes)
Like I said "right place right time" Now let's see what I can do about this ZD9XF joker on Tristan da Cunha
73 W9OY