Propagation
Propagation, part II
“The Sun, and the Ionosphere” Overview The sun is a gigantic, continuously running nuclear fusion reactor, 93 million miles away. It is so far away it takes the light from the sun eight plus minutes to reach Earth. Yet, that light from the sun can still cook the skin right off your shoulders if … Continue reading
Propagation Part I
This is the first in a multi part set of articles that will help you understand how to work more DX by understand band openings, and band closings. Continue reading
Review of “DX World”
“DX World” is broken into sections, and is sort of a running blog on the DX community, and what is current. The first section in “DX World”, is the “DX World Weekly Bulletin”. The Bulliten starts off with “DX This Week”, and is a recap of what DX was active in the past week. It provides general information on many, many DX stations. Continue reading
Review of the Challenger DX Antenna by GAP
This review of the Challenger DX Antenna by GAP Antenna will not be a highly technical review, it will be performance based. First off what is the GAP Challenger antenna? It is a vertical, which can be ground mounted. It has a limited number of radials, because it is not the traditional vertical, it is a vertical dipole, this gives it several advantages over a standard 1/4 wave vertical. Chiefly the reduced number of radials… Continue reading
Review of W8WWV’s S-Meter Lite
S-Meter Lite will graph S-Meter readings in real time, save spreadsheet ready files over very long time frames of your S meter values, assist in generating a pattern for your beam antenna, show RF levels in S units or in dB, and show signal level differences in dB between one signal and another on the same graph. Continue reading
Review of Afreet Software: HamCap
HamCap is a very simple front end for a very complex piece of backend software called VOCAP. What VOCAP does would be a paper in and of itself, so just click here to see an overview of VOCAP, if you don’t want to read the nine sections on VOCAP, just assume it is one of the best pieces of software available for prediction of current propagation conditions. In any case, HamCap uses the VOCAP engine to make propagation predictions, and then presents it to the user in a very simple view. Continue reading
Review of Afreet Software: FAROS
FAROS
Afreet Software has a suite of programs out for the Amateur Radio Operator, which are very useful, and in some cases work together swapping data between themselves, I have a few of them and will review them all over the next few months. I will start with FAROS.
I like to see when the bands are open and have been using a program called HamCap, that program provides a nice little map of the predicted propagation, and it is free! I wanted real time data, not predictions, so I researched the available options for this, and found two programs which looked promising, FAROS, and BeaconSee. After downloading BeaconSee, and FAROS, I set about to see which one was best for my purposes of seeing real-time propagation. Continue reading
Generating a Dopplergram of the Ionosphere
There exists a way to actually look at the Ionosphere, with nothing more than a computer and a radio… You can see the various changes to the Ionosphere, and learn things! A fun combination. Continue reading
