RV Service Net - 11 April 2019

During the second hour of Thursday's net I captured some audio and screen shots of the activity. The net control station, Sam WA4ICK, was S9+10 to me (in Baton Rouge) and painted a strong image on my FLEX-3000 SDR waterfall/panadapter view as shown below.

Click on image for an expanded view.

Improved propagation noted by several net participants can be attributed to an active region (with sunspots) on the Sun that has rotated back into Earth view and is raising the solar flux. On April 11 the sunspot number was 13.

A sample of the audio recording from around the middle of the second hour illustrates the reception here of signals from WA4ICK and W3TOM. Below is a screen shot of a portion of the audio waveform. You can see how the signal-to-noise (S/N) ratio changes after the hand-off from WA4ICK to W3TOM at about 1/3 of the way from the left.

Click on image for an expanded view.

The first third has a narrow baseline between syllables, indicative of my receive AGC turning down the gain in the presence of the strong signal. The remainder of the waveform has a lower S/N ratio as indicated by the thick baseline. Some fading is evident. The signal improved after the first few seconds. In this later 2/3 of the waveform the AGC opened up to allow more signal, but the noise was also higher. Click here for a 47-second recording that includes the portion represented by the above waveform.

 I have two longer recordings that I can share with interested parties upon request.

73,
John WA5MLF