Toward the end of March I ran WSPR and QRSS on the 60m band for a couple of weeks. I did some experiments on 60m nearly three years ago which gave good results and I was keen to improve that.
I posted on the new Knights QRSS list to announce that I would be active on 60m in the hope that some of the grabbers around the world would switch to 5MHz to listen for my signal and I was very pleased that a number of people happily switched over for a while. It’s an unusual band because there aren’t that many countries that have a 60m allocation and they don’t always match up around the world. Of course, anyone is free to receive on the band so that helps.
I was very pleased to receive the following reports.
G6NHU to ON4CDJ on 60m – 208 km
G6NHU to G3VYZ on 60m – 400 km
G6NHU to VE1VDM on 60m – 4,637 km
G6NHU to W4HBK on 60m – 7,293 km
All very good but no improvement over the tests we did before. There’s one more though.
G6NHU to ZL2IK on 60m – 18,130 km
This is a stacked image and is still quite weak so let’s zoom in a bit.
G6NHU as seen on ZK2IK’s 60m QRSS grabber
Here’s a capture from Pete’s eight hour grabber showing my received signal repeating itself around twelve times between 06:00z and 08:00z on 23rd March 2017.
Eight hour ZL2IK grabber showing G6NHU on 60m QRSS
As far as I’m aware, this is the first time that QRSS signals have been successfully transmitted from G to ZL. I’m using my Hans Summers U3S transmitter with around 250mW output into a random length doublet, just 30ft AGL at the east end, sloping down to 20ft AGL at the west end. Pete, ZL2IK is using an Icom IC-R75 communications receiver locked to a GPSDO frequency standard (no drift) and a combined 80/40m dipole fed through an ATU to match it to 60m.
