[CQ-Contest] Congrats to Russian DX Contest cracking downcheating

[K1TTT]

Not so fast... For those of you who have never seen a skimmer operating, it
does NOT give an absolute signal strength, it give an SNR value.  Those can
vary wildly based on the local noise, not to mention path fading,
polarization, and type of receive antenna.  During 160m cw in the middle of
otherwise normal propagation we saw something like a 20-30db dip in big
stateside signals from a single european skimmer, was that because of some
very selective fading for a short time, or was there a local noise source, a
storm, or bad cfl wiping out the skimmer?  When the bands are quiet the
values are interesting for comparing antennas, but hardly an absolute
measure of gain or power... When the bands are crowded the values are only
really good at saying who is REALLY loud or who might be in the noise.


David Robbins K1TTT
e-mail: mailto:k1ttt at arrl.net
web: http://www.k1ttt.net
AR-Cluster node: 145.69MHz or telnet://dxc.k1ttt.net
 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Zoltan Szoke [mailto:ha5pp_zoli at yahoo.com] 
> Sent: Saturday, February 12, 2011 07:26
> To: n4zr at contesting.com; cq-contest at contesting.com
> Subject: Re: [CQ-Contest] Congrats to Russian DX Contest 
> cracking downcheating
> 
> 
> I think here is the time to combine the contest stations HFTAs with 
> reversebeacon.net dB-info (signal strength) for power 
> analyzing. Perhaps we will 
> see something ... ;-) 
> 
> 
> The future is for reversebeacon.net! :)
> 
> 73, Zoli HA5PP
> 
> 
> 
> 
> ________________________________
> From: Pete Smith <n4zr at contesting.com>
> To: cq-contest at contesting.com
> Sent: Fri, February 11, 2011 2:14:59 PM
> Subject: Re: [CQ-Contest] Congrats to Russian DX Contest 
> cracking downcheating
> 
> On 2/11/2011 7:40 AM, DF3KV wrote:
> > I don´t see the difference to a qro station running an 
> Emtron DX-4 or
> > OM-3500 at full output.
> >
> > And how will you know before the contest started what 
> stations should be
> > tracked as you describe?
> The Reverse Beacon Network spots and records signal strength of all 
> stations that any of its contributors hears, and the data are 
> retained 
> indefinitely.  For example, you can review all 1.7 million spots from 
> 2010 CQWWCW simply by downloading the data files for the two 
> days from 
> <http://reversebeacon.net/raw_data/>.
> 
> 73, Pete N4ZR
> 
> The World Contest Station Database, updated daily at 
> www.conteststations.com
> The Reverse Beacon Network at http://reversebeacon.net, blog at 
> reversebeacon.blogspot.com,
> spots at telnet.reversebeacon.net, port 7000
> 
> 
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> 
> 
> 
>       
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