SAQ received in Bucharest, Romania

[Cezar Vener]

Hi everybody,
My name is Cezar and I am a hamradio operator from Bucharest, Romania (KN34AK, call is YO3FHM). I finally managed to receive the SAQ transmission today, starting with 08:45 UTC on 17.2 kHz VLF. I also received the 2nd transmission, starting with 10:45 UTC.
The receiving conditions were very poor, with a lot of noise coming from switching power supplies of the industrial telecommunication equipments that works in the immediate vicinity of my radio shack. To receive the SAQ signal, I was forced to use both the transceiver’s noise filters and band narrowing up to 200Hz. In these conditions, the signal report was about 459.
I used an Icom IC-7300 transceiver, a miniWhip antenna and a passive VLF converter.
The converter consist in a simple SBL-1 integrated mixer with 7dBm 5MHz carrier signal applied from a HP RF generator, an elliptic low-pass filter applied between the miniWhip antenna and the input of the SBL-1 mixer (for this time I used the IF input instead the RF input, to avoid the input transformer that cannot work properly on such low frequencies). I used the RF port of the SBL-1 as 50 ohms output device to the IC-7300.
It is my first attempt to receive SAQ and I am very happy to see that I did it 🙂
My congratulations for the entire team from SAQ !

Best regards,
Cezar YO3FHM

Topic

[Cezar Vener]

Good morning!
1 year from my first attempt to receive the SAQ transmission (see above).
For this time, I tried in an open field from the west side of my city (Bucharest), using a ferrite antenna, an active converter with SA612 and my IC-7300 transceiver.
The ferrite antenna has an inductance of 18 mH and is tuned on 17.2 KHz with a fixed 4.7nF capacitor and a variable one (15-550 pF). The converter is the typical schematic from the NE612 application note, but I put in the front of it an RF cascode preamp (FET+BJT) – around 20dB @12V. The carrier crystal is 10.7 MHz.
Here is the preamp schematic and LTSpice simulations results:

The 4uH coil is made only for test & measuring reasons (is a matching to 50 ohm port of my test equipment); after the alignment, I simply removed it.

And this is my open field setup (cclick to enlarge) :

This is a clip from the first transmission (9 UTC):

The frequency is 10717.25 ; it has a small 50Hz lift, but I didn’t tried to readjust.
I have a todo list for some improvements of the VLF converter, I will return to publish the project when will be ready.

Best regards,
Cezar YO3FHM

[Cezar Vener]

@Bernd: Congratulations for your receiver, Bernd! Works nice, and I suppose that in that “green” field you are far away from electric and EM interferences. Good job!
In my location, I have many problems with switching power supplies, different inverters, etc.
Look here how bad was the local VLF spectrum in the morning, at the 1st SAQ transmission:

I put a digital edited MP3 with the content of the 1st SAQ transmission here .

Fortunately, I had slightly good conditions at the 3rd SAQ transmission:

and screenshot #2:

For this session, I didn’t make any digital edit.

I also tried to receive with the miniWhip connected to the soundcard, using Spectrum Lab.
Look at the images below (click on them to enlarge):

The captured audio from the soundcard session is here:
Record #1
Record #2

I know that is not much, but considering the perturbations around, I am OK with what I done today.
Hope that the next time will be better !

Regards from Bucharest,
Cezar YO3FHM

[Bernd]

Hello friends
I have SAQ received on a field. Distance to the transmitter 510Km. My receiver is a homemade. I have a video published there you can hear SAQ.
May SAQ work for a long time.
73 55

https://www.google.de/maps/@52.5597739,13.644047,15z

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