Running costs VK3RRU

[VK3JUG]

With the change in duty cycle to continuous Tx on the new beacon, and more to come, we have already noticed an increase in our power bill and being a small club we need to watch our pennies. i was thinking of installing a switch to disable the beacons overnight either by time clock or sunset/sunrise. Those that use the beacons what times do you use them. Any other comments?
PeterN
VK3JUG

[VK2KRR]

For tropo in the south eastern areas, its early morning when most of the better DX occurs, especially for inland signals. Being realistic, I'd suggest that having it running from 5am to midday would be beneficial. Afternoons are the worst times for tropo due to the burn off of humidity by the sun, this doesnt usually recover until early morning hours. (Except for some rare cases such as mid-winter tropo which can pick up in the afternoon and evening and last for days)

But, during Sporadic E season, something like 5am till 7pm would work. But this would only really be needed from start of December till the start of February.
Outside these months it could be set to run from 5am to 12pm (midday).

If it was possible to also add in a period of 7pm to 10pm, that could also be beneficial for some 'after work' evening listeners also.

This is exactly where a WSPR mode beacon is beneficial, only TXing for 2 mins every 14 mins or so would be a significant saving, not to mention the other advantages, like automatic reception reports available online 24 hours a day Rather than having it transmitting to no one the majority of the time. Just my opinion of course.

[VK1KW]

Don't see it often with a steady carrier but do see pings.
If it could be done - 1 hour past sunset OFF - 1 hour before sunrise ON.
else pick the summer sunset and sunrise times that is if you need to do it at all.

[VK5PJ]

Hi Peter,
firstly can you reduce the duty cycle of the beacon as a first measure? Putting in time clocks is usually a messy answer and leaves a lot of doubt in peoples minds about whether the beacon is ON or is the band shut. It also turns people away from listening for the beacon as they have no faith it will be on.

If you could get it to do a few diddles or K's during the idle time and then do it's ID and back to extended idle with occasional K's it might get your consumption back down and avoid the complications of a time clock.

just a thought, as every one will have a different idea on when it is best for it to be on.

Regards,
Peter, vk5pj

P.S it is a good indicator at my home and used often.

[VK2JDH]

Are you in a position to put a solar panel in for the beacon. The CCARC runs a quite a few repeaters and beacons and the bill was getting significant . They put in some panels to keep the batteries charged, with a backstop of the charger switching on to boost if the batteries were getting low.

[VK3DXE]

I'm more of the inclination to have it running overnight. I quite often go beacon hunting in the wee small hours. IMHO, to have a beacon that is only there at certain times is very likely to lead to people stopping looking for it.

Is there any possibility of scoring some solar panels and at least reducing the running costs that way. Maybe somebody here has something they're willing to donate?

[VK3TU]

Peter,

As discussed, the beacon has a 100W pa stage that's barely being used. Its efficiency is likely to be pretty ordinary when its only making 25W. Try running it without the PA stage and see how much current it draws then. The driver should easily make a healthy 25W or so on its own and you might find the efficiency improves. There's plenty of heat-sink capacity on it too so that shouldn't be a problem.

The PA and driver on the RFI transmitters are monitored and controlled with on an I squared C bus so you might have to fool it into thinking everything is still OK on the PA stage. Alternatively, try unplugging the bus connector to the PA and see if it recognises the absence of the PA.

Bert
VK3TU

[VK7DB]

Put a scanning receiver on there that listens for other beacons, and when the band opens have it turn the beacon transmitter on for a period of time..

[ZL2BKC]

With the change in duty cycle to continuous Tx on the new beacon, and more to come, we have already noticed an increase in our power bill and being a small club we need to watch our pennies. i was thinking of installing a switch to disable the beacons overnight either by time clock or sunset/sunrise. Those that use the beacons what times do you use them. Any other comments?
PeterN
VK3JUG

Hi Peter,

What I have done at 2 beacon sites here (ZL2UHF and ZL2WHO/b) with the multi-beacon controller may be of interest. Firstly since the digital schedule is based on GPS time the firmware has the concept of 2 schedules. This will either reduce power or go QRT in in the "stupid-oclock" hours set by 2 hourly set points.

The other feature is DTMF control from a local repeater. Mark ZL2WHO uses this feature to dial up the power levels for the lower band beacons when Hepburn looks promising. This means you can run low power during winter and when summer rolls around set the power and time scheduled to be more appropriate for the increased audience at that time of the year. The schedule can also be changed by DTMF which solves daylight savings issues etc.

Of course this requires someone with some micro skills, but generally you need that for the CW bit anyway. Adding some extra bits just requires time and a slightly more capable micro.

It would be interesting to hear comments about a good set of times to go off air. Maybe Adam could query the VKlogger databanks and produce a histogram of times most contacts are made during the day. This could prove to be a valuable input help you decide a good schedule.

73,
Wayne ZL2BKC

[VK5GR]

One concept for beacons I recently have started thinking about was finding ways to have beacons receive and report what they are hearing as well as transmit - so that you can actually automatically map band openings and times and report it back on the web. This would be in addition of course to home stations just trying to receive them.

The way I was thinking of doing this was having a Tx for 5 seconds once every minute in a network of 12 beacons on a time sequnece (like the NCDXF beacons on HF). Keeps the individual site duty cycle down but with them running on a schedule they might hopefully be useful to the DX community? If they could be lowish powered (say 1W) but there be 12 of them scattered around the state, they might be able to map the extent of tropo openings and provide maps on a 1 minute cycle with their receive capability (and 3G network reporting).

Now, if continuous transmit is an issue, and indeed power is very expensive these days (33-35c/kWH is not uncommon), do beacons in general need to think more about a TX then go quiet strategy? Apart from meteor scatter, if they transmit for 20 seconds and then shut down for 40 seconds, and are known to always key up at second '0' as defined by a GPS clock, would that still benefit the DX community? Just curious how the dedicated DXers use beacons and what their thoughts are on approaches like this?

[ADMIN]

Have you considered using the VK Logger History functionality?
The elephant in room?

You will find no less than 928 spots for VK3RRU, going back to 22-Jan-2007 when spots were first recorded to a database back-end.

You can cut & paste the entire table into an XLS work sheet, and massage from there.
(Because of the volume of data, some processes can be slow within Excel.)
I would just delete every column except for the UTC time, if that's what interests you.

I'll leave you to create the histogram or standard deviation chart (which I'm no good at anyway!)


This should provide a real-world snap shot for when people are listening for it?

[ADMIN]

And if you're after a recent summary, then there's the actual beacon record page itself:

(But I assume people already know about this functionality!)

[VK3ZAZ]

With the change in duty cycle to continuous Tx on the new beacon, and more to come, we have already noticed an increase in our power bill and being a small club we need to watch our pennies. i was thinking of installing a switch to disable the beacons overnight either by time clock or sunset/sunrise. Those that use the beacons what times do you use them. Any other comments?
PeterN
VK3JUG

I regularly time switched VK3SIX then VK3RMV when it was set up for TEP 6 and 10m
OFF at 2300 local on at 0900 using old electro mechanical time switch.
Even so the fees went from $40 onwards every quarter now even more.
Yes it cost money to run a beacon, I was lucky to have WIA pay the licence but I paid for all the gear antenna and power and for break and thefts from 1984 to 2012 on and off could have bought myself a nice new rig..
don't expect any sympathy from the lounge lizards they care less except when they report it OFF.
Why not go solar power in long run panels are cheaper than power..
Good luck.

[VK2KRR]

One concept for beacons I recently have started thinking about was finding ways to have beacons receive and report what they are hearing as well as transmit - so that you can actually automatically map band openings and times and report it back on the web. This would be in addition of course to home stations just trying to receive them.

As mentioned in the 2nd post to this topic, this is exactly what the WSPR software does. I see no reason why the 2m beacons in Australia cant be set up with WSPR and the CW at the end of each WSPR transmission.

Still astounds me that clubs would want their beacons running 24/7 CW not knowing if anyone at all is evening listening to them. Crazy.

Steve VK3ZAZ did set up VK3RMV as a 6m WSPR beacon recently and it seemed good.

Imagine if all the beacons were set up to run WSPR and all stations could just monitor one single frequency, and the beacons could be set up to run just 10% TX rate, and max of 10 watts. They could be set to TX and RX (with internet access for uploading spots), or TX only. Some beacons could be set as RX only and just upload what they hear.

But at least you can then look at a map and see who is out there looking for your beacon, who is hearing it and what the band conditions are doing. Geez, god forbid, but people could even leave their radio running through the night and their stations can automatically report the beacons reports to the internet to be observed the following day (or at the time if people are awake).

Just look at the great beaconing all these stations were doing this afternoon on 6m WSPR, and imagine how much more active and useful a beacon system would be when integrated into the WSPR set up with this lot!The same thing can and does happen on 2m WSPR also, even 70cm -

6m WSPR this afternoon

6m WSPR map zoom in

There is also the data able to be viewed on the WSPR database pages.

6m WSPR database snapshot

[VK3DXE]

WSPR is an absolute no-brainer. Set the TX % and everybody knows when to listen for a particular beacon. And, as Leigh says, everybody can see what it's doing and who's hearing it.

[VK5BC]

WSPR beacons would be a great way to go. The big issue is timing and frequency stability which probably means you need internet at the sites as well as a SSB rig, I think most beacons are old FM rigs.

73's Brian
VK5BC

[VK2EFM]

Hi,
If you require TX only, the Ulitmate 3S WSPR kits are interesting. No internet, just a GPS receiver. Without much effort, this holds 1Hz stability. You would require a simple PA made from a RD16HVF1 for 5W. Other Mitsi devices can get other power levels.
I have one at home and have been toying with the idea of making it solar. It draws just over an 1A (read I haven't checked with multimeter) from 13.8V.
Only real downside with WSPR is no audible ident. You can set a CW ident, but it takes just under two minutes to run through the TX cycle.
The Ultimate 3S has other modes as well. CW etc.
One aspect of WSPR that can't be ignored is the processing gain with the modulation scheme. A 5W transmitter is quite adequate, so a beacon location (big hill) even lower power levels would work.
73,
VK2EFM
Allan

[VK2ZIW]

When looking for Meteor Scatter or airplane, a constant beacon is a must.
Drop the power. Or, go solar.

Used solar panels, panels with ground leakage or corrosion are becoming common.
We use them for low voltage, so no problem.

Alan VK2ZIW

[VK7JG]

I think you are getting a little OFF Topic .
All of these very nice extensions to a beacon cost money to run let alone time . I assume that you would require a computer and internet connection for WSPR operation
If the bacon was in your shack and you could work on it at your leisure not a problem.

VK7RAE takes me half a day and 200K of traveling every time something goes wrong .
With five beacons two power supplies and a GPS receiver it does not run trouble free for ever.

Until I fitted a watch dog timer to the GPS receiver a power glitch would stop it from operating and a visit to the site to do a a power reset was required .

The GPS aerial failed last year so this took two trips to fix as on your first visit you do not expect to have a faulty aerial when you notice that your beacons have lost the 10Mhz lock signal .

Back to the original question ,One way to reduce running costs is to reduce the TX duty cycle . For another reason we had to do this with the 432Mhz beacon .
This is keyed on every two seconds for 0.6 of a second so the average power is reasonably low compared with continuous carrier .

Regards.
Joe
VK7JG

[VK2GFR]

From left of field...
I've read the various comments and agree with most, although the WSPR option is purely data driven, not your typical "old fashioned" ICW identification.

Anyway, how about a unit where the beacon custodians are able to "manually activate" the beacon remotely by means of a simple timer/dutycylce/ pre-programmed timer circuit? (i.e) DTMF code sent via another radio freq to the beacon site receiver (on vhf/uhf/shf??)
This way the beacon is only on for a pre-determined time, with a possible reset delay?

Jaycar sell a short form kit that'll do the goods, less the DTMF rx stuff.
Duty cycle from a few seconds to several hours via a relay switch (or multiple relays).
Set it to be active for the pre-determined time, then off it goes.

For my basic set up on 6m, by simply scanning the FM repeater portion & 52.525, the band openings can be observed. (I don't have SSB)

Whilst this is not a perfect nor absolutely reliable option, it is just that... an option.