GW4VXE's Station Diary

The lack of 10m FT8 spots made me question whether the SDR/loop was working ok. It's perhaps worth explaining how this works. It's an indoor active loop given to me by John G8CQX. This goes into a SDRPlay RSP2Pro receiver running on an old laptop which, amongst other things, runs SparkSDR. SparkSDR is the nicest SDR program I know for decoding FT8 and FT4. It calls an instance of WSJT-X, so it decodes everything that WSJT-X would.

Anyhow, a quick test of the loop on 20m showed signals coming through and when I powered off the loop, the signals disappeared. So it's propagation rather than a problem - which I thought it probably was, but for so long, I have seen signals coming through on 10m FT8 regularly, it was unusual to see so little.

I shouldn't have worried. Around lunchtime, 10m FT8 seemed to liven up again, with signals from Africa and South America. I couldn't say the bands were brilliant, but nice to work TZ4AM on 17m CW and RI0SP up in the Arctic (now in HR27) on 20m CW.