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Sunday, April 25, 2010

Running into Alan, VK2ZAY, in Belgium

I first met Alan, VK2ZAY, years ago when his web site alerted Billy and me to the fascinating world of trivial electric motors. Over the years we seem to have bounced around in similar kinds of projects. Yesterday morning, our two QRSS signals sort of crashed into each other in Belgium, on the "grabber" of Johan, ON5EX. Alan was making the LONG trip on about 1.5 watts, with all kinds of cool and sophisticated modulation (including HELL). My sig was, in comparison, a local, and a crude local at that: just 10 mW with nothing but an FSK pattern. For few minutes there we were on exactly the same freq, so I shifted up by about 20 hertz (amazing how quickly we get used to making such TINY frequency changes!). The screen shot above shows the results.

Here is a shot of one version of Alan's constantly evolving QRSS rig.

Conditions aren't quite so good this morning. Alan's signal is visible on the ON5EX grabber, but mine is only very faintly and intermittently in there.

I included the photo from Alan's Twitter page, because I felt a bit guilty about the last picture we ran of him -- he was wearing a hat made of LED's!

3 comments:

  1. G'day Bill.

    That warm-up drift was rather embarrassing wasn't it! Normally I let the TX warm up into a dummy load so I don't unleash my drift on the innocent Knights of QRSS. Alas, this particular evening I was not so careful.

    Great to see you got the modulator multi-vibrating. Still haven't tried the ET-style QRSS modulator, but do have an ambition to try that and the candle-powered QRSS TX one day.

    Regards,
    Alan

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  2. Shouldn't you eventually send your ID even with simple FSK QRSS transmission?

    ReplyDelete
  3. I had been wondering about the ID thing too. He addressed this issue in #117 around minute 15... Probably too low power to matter.

    I think part 15 was meant, not part 97.

    ReplyDelete

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