Research
Two reports from 2017, kept at their original addresses. They describe work at a single point in time and are not being updated, so some of their outside links may no longer work.
Intercontinental low-band QSOs during the 2017-08-21 eclipse
During the total solar eclipse of August 21, 2017, WU1ITU/7 operated from western Oregon, about ten miles north of the path of totality, transmitting on 40 m toward Japan with roughly 1800 W EIRP. The report combines the station’s own FT8 log with Reverse Beacon Network spots, pskreporter.info data and WSPRnet.org spots to ask whether the eclipse briefly opened the 7 MHz path to east Asia about four hours after local sunrise.
- Maximum obscuration at the operating site was 1718 UTC. FT8 QSOs with YC4CHP (1709), JH4ALY and JA2VRZ (1716) all fell within about ten minutes of it.
- WSPR spots between North America and east Asia appeared from 1700 to 1730 UTC and in no other hour of that day’s window, a short peak that closely matched maximum obscuration.
- The comparison with the rest of summer 2017 is treated cautiously: seven North American stations were spotted that day, against at most two on other days, but many of them were active only because of the eclipse.
- The suggested 20-minute window may differ from the four-hour period reported in earlier research on the 1999 eclipse. A brief WU1ITU/4 operation in Georgia found no eclipse effect on the path to Europe.
JT65 Deep Search of all OOO signals from an EME DXpedition
Standard WSJT-X and WSJT 10 apply Deep Search only to messages sent to your own callsign or to CQs. This report describes an unofficial patch that also applies Deep Search to the OOO reports an EME DXpedition sends to other stations, giving more decodes of the DXpedition and better information about which moon elevations work best for a given station.
- The patches were built against WSJT-X 1.8.0-rc2 and WSJT 10 r6470, and were described as not extensively tested.
- A working patch shows occasional “d1” decodes whose second callsign matches the DX Call box. False decodes are expected, such as those seen for VK9XGJ on 2017-10-07.
- Extra decoding raises Deep Search resource use by about 50 percent and requires a CALL3.TXT file with the DX station’s grid.
- Patch files: WSJT-X and WSJT 10.