My WSPR-2 experiments on 7 MHz today morning (2017.07.19)

I wrote a few articles about amateur radio in the recent few weeks and I decided to write another.

You can also transmit/receive text/pictures with a radio not just simple voice.
This time I tried a text-based application.
The radio is still transmitting and receiving sounds of course but the computer (or any other device like laptop/smartphone/tablet/pda) is decoding/encoding this sound and that's how you get the text.
However some radios have buit-in decoders for some digital applications.

The propagation was not so good for SSB phone communications from my QTH today morning so I tried some digital (weak signal) experiments on the band.

I used WSJT-X 1.6.0 to transmit and receive WSPR-2 signals.

My equipment:

Radio (transceiver): Yaesu FT-450D
Antenna: Half-Wave Inverted-V Antenna for 7 MHz (~20 meters long, 7 meters above the ground).

This is not the ideal radio for WSPR becuase it's working between 5 Watts and 100 Watts!
So I used it on 5 Watts because I can't go any lower!
Most WSPR users are use much less than 5 Watts! A lot of them using 1 Watt and below!

Statistics for today morning:

Receiving statistics:
In a 10 minutes timeframe (between 09:26 UTC and 09:36 UTC) I received 6 unique stations.
Minimum distance: 269 km - OM1AI from Slovakia with 0.2 Watts (200 mW).
Maximum distance: 1099 km - DK8JP from Germany with 1 Watt.
Number of countries: 4 (I decoded stations from 4 countries)
Countries by name: Bulgaria, Slovakia, Germany, Czech Republic.

Transmitting statistics:
In a 10 minutes timeframe (between 09:26 UTC and 09:36 UTC) 25 unique stations received me.
Minimum distance: 589 km - DL5RBD from Germany.
Maximum distance: 2015 km - GM4SFW from Scotland.
Number of countries: 7 (My signal heard in 7 countries)
Countries by name: Germany, Netherlands, Denmark, France, Scotland, England, Belgium.

The website of the WSPR is automatically generates a map with the stations:

Image source: WSPRnet Map.

Not bad for just 10 minutes!
With WSPR, You can easily hear and you can easily heard (by) a lot of stations around the whole planet with a very simple antenna! If you don't have license for transmitting you can still try the receiving side if you have a receiver.

Thank you for reading!

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Have a nice day!