VK2GOM wrote:I certainly haven't heard anything through the speaker. And further to that, I haven't really even got a full callsign copy... only through seeing this discussion topic, then seeing the 'KW' in the QRSS do I know what the source is!
You are probably aware that beacons sometimes get 'spotted' just because a signal is heard on or about the nominal freq, ie without decoding ident. Whilst that practice might give correct results some of the time, if we all did it the spot database would be less useful.
One could insist that if you can't get Q5 copy, you cannot identify a signal... but with a bit of sleuthing it is possible to identify a signal with fairly high confidence even though it is not Q5.
An example was ZL1TPH's recordings of a few weeks ago where there was a question of whether he was hearing VK5RSE. There was little doubt in my mind as when you looked at the timing of the elements that were visible on a spectrum trace, there were limited choices of what fitted in between. For example, though I could not see all of the dits of the 5, I could see three and there was no valid character that could fit in the interval up to the visible start of the following R. Likewise around the S and E. Now that was plotting high speed CW, had VK5RSE carried a short QRSS3 segment then narrower bin settings could be used and the signal that was indistinct to the ear would have been clearer.
If you know that VK1KW's message repeats on a 2min cycle and that the QRSS3 segment occupies the even minutes with "KW", then it is most unlikely that some other signal resulted in the spectrum chart you offered.
In a wider application, if beacons included a minute or two of QRSS3 with some known and distinctive content (perhaps the last two letters of the callsign), distinctive considering the frequency, we could reasonably accurately identify signals even though they might not qualify as 'readable'.
Identifying a beacon is an important step to usefully observing it as an 'early warning' propagation indicator.
I have been constructing a suitable with 6 isolated outputs to key the various resurrected VK1 beacons, so if accepted it may provide opportunity to identify the beacons at quite low levels. Though the driver outputs are isolated, the keying is synchronised so if you hear a beacon on one band, the timing on the other bands is the same.
Owen
