[CQ-Contest] Fieldstrength values from SDR recordings

[Christian Schneider]

Hi,
an update of software HDSDR now allows to extract fieldstrength values 
from SDR recordings (several per second). I played a bit with CW and SSB 
signals from our TopTen stations in 2016 
http://www.darc.de/der-club/referate/dx/contest/wag/en/newsarchives/field-strength/ 
It contains values for 80m from three different periods.

Advantages: They eliminate the unknown variable N from the S/N figures 
of RBN and can be extracted from any transmitted signal, be it a CQ, a 
short call in S&P mode and also from SSB signals.

Disadvantage: Other than RBN they require "some" manual work... And as 
promising they look for several reasons there is the usual disclaimer: 
They stem from propagated signals from different areas and are generated 
by antennas of different qualities, so they do not allow too hasty 
conclusions about output power. And there are still a lot of millisecond 
settings in the software to experiment with.

So this is only a very first impression what could be done. At least 
another item for analyzes in the toolbox, maybe once for adjucation 
purposes, too?

73, Chris DL8MBS
(WAG Contestmanager)