29 May 2020 - midnight Es Log

[daveB]

I was reminded in another post about the 11pm - 2 am SpE opening towards the south - which I had totally forgotten about and hadn't logged on FMList.

For those interested I've included a link so you can see just what was logged by my unattended set-up. The opening lasted just over three hours from 29/05 22:52 to 30/05 - local time.

One hundred and seven separate transmitters were logged - all the way to 108.0 MHz

https://app.box.com/s/tkqrwwqpxci7t4dp0zvcssiuvmxxn1ib

As previously mentioned. The set up for unattended scanning consists of a dedicated i5-3750u / 4gB RAM tiny PC bought off ebay for £180 with SDRSharp running an RTL dongle (R820T). The FMSuite plug-in has a full frequency scanner and of course the RDS Data is picked up via RDSSpy. The PC has sufficient power to run two instances of SDR# so with two fixed beams I can cover from around 70 deg to 220 deg. (FMSuite is unfortunately a 'CPU' hog]. I've been using this set up since June 2015.

Now we all know that an 8 bit RTL dongle has limited dynamic range, and isn't the most sensitive device but over the six seasons I have had a huge amount of success. Apart from new stations the data provided - length of opening, strength of openings, and direction of opening - is far more than I'd get without it. It provides and indicator of which recordings to look at. eg the scan log was the first indication that Azerbaijan had been received.

You can achieve a similar result with Andy Pritchard's RDSDatalogger to drive SDR#, but still logging the RDSData thru RDSSpy, but it takes a lot longer to cover the whole band - but it doesn't use any more CPU power.

If any one is interested in the details, in particular how I pull together the frequency log generated from SDR# with the RDS Log generated by RDSSpy - PM me - I'm happy to share. And as dongles are very cheap it is well worth a look.


David