[600MRG] /20 last night

[Kenneth G. Gordon]

On 12 Dec 2013 at 9:49, Rudy Severns wrote:

> This is the message I sent last night which was rejected by the mail
> daemon???

Huh?!?!? I didn't see that. What message did you get from the daemon?

> Looks like another good night on the band.  I've been getting steady
> WSPR decodes for XIQ, XJM and XXM although I think their signals are a
> bit weaker than last night although I can still see them on ARGO. 

Band conditions on the lower bands have been REEEEEAAALY weird. 
Everything goes long as soon as it gets dusk, and QSB is very, very deep, 
and very, very long. A real PITA.

> Mike /12 is Q5 absolutely QSO quality.  When the ice storm predicted
> for the next day or two passes I'll be back on the air hunting a QSO. 
> Ralph /7 has a Q5 signal as usual and Pat's /6 QRSS trace is
> consistently readable with less QSB than usual.

Very good.

> My local noise level has also dropped, not due to anything I've done
> however.  I guess I'm hoping that the equipment generating the noise
> froze solid and won't be back.  Fat chance!  I did one interesting
> thing,  I switched the receiver to AM reception and looked at the
> audio with ARGO. This gave me the spectrum of the AC hash I've been
> hearing.  The hash is all locked solidly to 60 Hz with many higher
> harmonics, both even and odd.  Even harmonics come from full-wave
> rectification but the odd harmonics indicate half-wave rectification. 
> That's the kind of cheapo stuff used in microwave ovens.  What puzzles
> me why the higher order harmonics (>7) are so strong. In ordinary
> rectifiers the harmonic amplitudes die off pretty quickly but not in
> what I'm seeing????  I also looked at the hash with FM reception and
> saw lots of harmonics there.  The wobbly oscillations I see wandering
> across the band have both AM and FM modulation.

I have a very similar noise situation here with a "wobbly" modulated signal of 
some sort that wanders around the band. I HAVE heard it abruptly quit at 
infrequenct intervals.

I have still not been able to track it down, although at this point, I am 
reasonably sure it isn't within my own home.

Ken W7EKB