Season Preps And a New Feature On My Blog: The KONG And Smøla Yaslogs!

 Another beautiful and dry morning at the KONG HQ, the photo below was taken at 06 local. DX here is totally dead due to the high solar activity with X flares and an ongoing proton event.

Yesterday afternoon was spent removing ground rods from a previous antenna installation for later use. Hard work, but as Billy Ocean once sang: When The Going Gets Tough, The Tough Get Going....!

Collected ground rods (among tools and other antenna related things)

A new feature on this blog is Yaslogs! These are a vital a part of a MW DX-ers' daily routine - that is, for Perseus/Jaguar users. A short look of the Yaslog is enough to see if it's worthwhile to check recordings or not. They also provide an interesting illustration into how signals are affected by geomagnetic activity. For those not familiar with this feature, below is an illustration of what it does and what we can see.

Today's Yaslog (including 4 hours from yesterday) on the 50-degrees beverage

The Yaslog we see on our PCs is updated every minute, while the net version is updated every hour.

Now obviously, the Yaslog has its limitations. A DX-er in North America will not be able to track interesting openings inside his/her continent since signal levels will be high most of the time anyway. Same goes for us in Europe if we want to chase specific Asian and Pacific signals such as New Zealand. But it makes it super easy to see if transcontinental signals are present. And the effects of geomagnetic disturbances are extremely easy to spot - and often provide an opportunity for excellent DX in itself.

Naturally, the Yaslog only gives us the broad picture. To detect the really interesting signals, we focus on the carriers of each frequency. But when I checked the 10-er frequencies on our 310-degrees beverage this morning, I know for sure that I don't have to check my recordings. By the way the rather strong signals on some frequencies are where the American and European/Asian frequencies "meet", such as 900, 990, 1080, 1170 etc.

"Nothing to see here folks, move on!"

The links to the Yaslogs are on the right-hand section of the blog:

At the time of writing, the KONG-340 Yaslog is empty - the antenna is not up yet and the Perseus is not running.

So, why make these Yaslogs available? Well, I know for sure that some DX-ers use the URLs as browser favourites for their own info, especially if they don't use the Perseus/Jaguar combo themselves. So, they may be of use for some. The links would probably not be active from mid-April until late August when the antennas are down.

KONG48 (the short version) is held the coming weekend with Ole and OJS arriving Thursday and Friday to set up gear, work with antennas (including the 340), enjoy a bit of food and drinks before leaving Monday morning. And would you believe it - it's going to rain!

The Nooelec 50 kHz - 150 MHz 20-dB LNA

I ordered it because the Fobos SDR I was using had pretty mediocre sensitivity, and I wanted to see if a preamp could increase it a bit. The Fobos had other issues too, so I ended up returning it. But I think the Nooelec will come in handy when FM season kicks off next May.

At KONG HQ, we’re no strangers to preamps. We need to split each of our signals to three users using MiniCircuits 8-port passive splitters. Sometimes, the MW band signals are so weak that preamplification actually makes a difference.

However, many DX-ers deal with high noise floors where a preamp won’t help and might even overload the receiver. So, it’s a bit of a mixed bag.

Anyway, I was curious to see how it performs on the SW bands.

This device is tiny compared to what we’re used to, like this 16-dB preamp from DX-Engineering!

Nooelec LNA vs. DX-Engineering RPA-2

So, it’s got SMA ports on both the input and output. You power it with a 5VDC supply through a Micro-USB port. Honestly, it might be a good idea to switch to the more common USB-C port soon.

For this quick test, I set up a Perseus22 with a center frequency of 15 MHz, which lets me receive from 14.2 to 15.8 MHz. I picked 15290 kHz kind of by chance - NHK World Radio was broadcasting in Japanese from the Issoudur transmitter in France at that time. I used a 5-meter high, 20-meter long sloping L-antenna, which worked great. The LNA was powered by a battery bank

So, this is what the spectrum and waterfall looked like before I hooked up the LNA.

The noise floor is around -120 dBm, with signal levels hitting just at or below -70 dBm. When I turned on the LNA, here’s what happened

The noise floor has gone up to about -100 dBm, and the peak signal levels are just below -50 dBm, which matches the 2.5 dB loss the manufacturer mentioned. The 27-dB gain increase on 15290 is because of random and quick signal level changes. We do see a few more signals on the waterfall that might be clearer with the LNA, but there’s also more noise. So, in this test, the LNA likely didn’t help with signal recovery. With a lower noise floor, it might make a difference.

I spent about  USD 35 on the device and another $12 for the slow USPS shipping. Right now, the RPA-2 HF Preamplifier from DX-Engineering (shown above) is priced at USD 270. It’s definitely more versatile. But it makes you wonder: Could we do with less?

The KONG HQ is Ready (Almost)

 I did some antenna work this and last weekend, along with SDR testing. Last weekend I rolled out the 50-degrees beverage antenna in sunshine and 20 Celsius. Not quite high today, but 15 Celsius is still warm for 1st September. Cloudy and a little breezy. Having spotted no reindeer, I elevated the 50-degrees beverage to an average of 130 cm. I also rolled out the 310 degrees beverage, which points roughly towards Chicago. It has an average height of around 200 cm.

"Far end" of the 50-degrees beverage

"Looking home" towards the feedline of the 310-degrees beverage

What remains to do is to deploy the staggered 340-degrees beverage, and to ground and elevate the 80-degrees beverage.

Perseus22 testing continues. Phasing the 50 and 80 beverage wasn't a good idea, they were too close in performance. I have now replaced the 80 with the newly erected 310 for a better difference in directivity. And finally, one for the food lovers:

Junipers! Not often ripe at this latitude. Great for flavouring reindeer and lamb meat