WSPR

My new favorite HF antenna is the 1/4 Wave HF Vertical DX Antenna with 2 Elevated Radials. It is NOT the most portable antenna (an EFHW wins there) but it is the easiest HF antenna to construct! It is easier to construct, install, and tune than even the basic dipole antenna! It takes less than 15 minutes to build and get on the air with this HF DX antenna! No impedance transformer is required. After trimming, the antenna can directly feed 50 Ω coax. A 1:1 common-mode choke (coax choke works too) at the feedpoint is recommended but NOT absolutely required at low power levels. ...

This is an early design sketch of a UHF (70cm - 440 MHz) WSPR beacon. This design comes from Ismo (OH2FTG). Key Points 10 MHz OCXO TCXO powering the Si5351 module instead of the usual 25 or 26 MHz 0.5 ppm TCXO. Si5351 generates 217 MHz output, which we double to ~434Mhz using the https://techlib.com/files/diodedbl.pdf technique. Use 440 MHz SAW filter at the output (from LCSC) ONSEMI MMBD701LT1G RF Schottky diodes - locally available ...

My solar powered WSPR beacon is now active on the 12m band! Tech Stack Tech stack: Navitas 100W Solar Panel, Exide Solar Blitz 40AH battery, Skypearll Solar Charge Controller 30A, 200W 20A DC-DC CC CV Buck module (Robu) - set to output 7.5V, Waveshare ESP32-S3 Zero board, Si5351 with 0.5ppm TCXO, GSD-Hacks-v5 amplifier, DFRobot Gravity Digital 5A Relay Module Photos of components involved (for reference): ...

Setup OS and SDR Please use the latest Raspberry Pi OS 64-bit on RPi 4 or later. Using a Raspberry Pi (<=3) is NOT recommended as it has quite a bit of power supply noise on the USB ports, which reduces the performance of the connected SDR. user@rpi:/etc$ cat /etc/os-release PRETTY_NAME="Debian GNU/Linux 13 (trixie)" NAME="Debian GNU/Linux" VERSION_ID="13" ... Install dependencies: sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install airspyhf \ soapysdr-tools sox libsox-fmt-all wsjtx \ pulseaudio-utils git vim fluxbox xterm tightvncserver \ libqt5websockets5 cmake build-essential sudo apt-get install cmake pkg-config \ libusb-1.0-0-dev \ libasound2-dev \ libairspy-dev \ libairspyhf-dev \ librtlsdr-dev \ libsndfile1-dev \ portaudio19-dev \ libvolk-dev Build airspyhf-fmradion SDR software: ...

Here is the FT8 WAV test file. On an AMD64 machine: 1 second using the fast decode settings. We were able to get the MSHV's FT8 engine to work on Android, thanks to the work done by https://github.com/sannysanoff/SDRPlusPlusBrown folks. Around ~4.5 seconds to decode the same file. This is why we can't really have full-blown realtime FT8 decoder(s) on Android just yet! Idea: But we can surely use this full-blown FT8 decoder in our FT8 Decoder app which has no realtime requirements! ...

OCXO's are awesome - this is what I learned while trying to get WSPR working reliably on the 2m band. Hardware Here is all you need for reliable WSPR'ing on the 2m band: A RAW OCXO "can" works fine too! Note: This modified Si5351 board image comes from SimonsDialogs. Essentially, we modify the CLK2 output port to become an input port that accepts the OCXO's output signal. ...

The wspr_spread work is excellent. Doppler Spread It helped us debug why our TCXO-powered-WSPR beacon was pretty decent on 4m band but flaky on 2m. Doppler spread value on 70 MHz: ... 70.0924994 VU3CER MK68 23 0 0.29 1 1 0 1 44 1 810 0.517 Now see the problem on 144 MHz: ... 144.4905417 VU3CER MK68 23 -3 0.12 1 1 0 1 39 1 810 0.865 ...

Our WSPR beacon design works fine even on the 4m band (~70 MHz) . The key is to use a 25 MHz high-quality TCXO, like the 25 MHz HCI 0.5ppm TCXO! Results Challenges 2m WSPR is still out of reach for now - see the following sporadic decodes. Of course, the next challenge is to get 2m WSPR beacons working 100% reliably at a low cost. ...

Our 6m WSPR beacon design works fine now. The key is to use a 25 MHz high-quality TCXO, like the 25 MHz HCI 0.5ppm TCXO! 2m WSPR is still out of reach for this VFO design - see the following drifty screenshots: While WSPR is no good, 2m FT8 works pretty fine! ...

We make heavy use of Easy-Digital-Beacons-v1 for testing RF amplifiers. This single board is a versatile WiFi VFO and FT8 / FT4 / WSPR beacon. You can also use our CW-SigGen project to generate a suitable test signal.