SAQ Reception near Hondo, Texas

[AB5YO]

SAQ was received near Hondo, Texas (USA) on December 1st. The carrier was overwhelmed by atmospheric noise, but it was weakly visible on a spectrogram in between lightning strikes.

The sensor is a single 1 meter diameter loop antenna fed into a low-noise transimpedance amplifier. The amplifier output is band-pass filtered to pass 10kHz to 35kHz to a Tascam DR-08 audio recorder (set to 24-bit resolution and 96ksps).

The location was a rural ranch of a few hundred acres. It is estimated that the nearest power line was approximately 1km away from the antenna. The antenna was located so that it could be rotated to a null in utility line noise, but with an SAQ signal strength at a maximum (loop oriented roughly northeast).

The goal before Christmas Eve is to build a loop array with good front-to-back gain, to hopefully remove most of the noise from the tropic regions.

Topic

[Samuel Blackshear]

Geeetings, Fredrik,

I replied to your email earlier, but you may need to check your spam folder. Your earlier message was sent to my “junk” folder and I had to retrieve it there.

Best regards,

AB5YO

[Samuel Blackshear]

OK, this is done. Please let me know if there are any questions. I can send a spectrogram if this is useful.

Kind Regards,

AB5YO

[AlexanderSAQ]

Interesting report – many thanks!
It would be great if you could issue an official report, using our online form that can be found here: https://forms.gle/TRZwGrvTMCcEpEvF8

Thanks in advance
Fredrik / Alexander association

[Author]

Replies