[TowerTalk] Actual LP Performance vs Tribanders

[Jim Lux]

At 07:02 AM 6/28/2004 -0400, Pete Smith wrote:
>At 02:08 AM 6/28/2004, Larry Phipps wrote:
>
>
>Frankly, I think these are show-stoppers, as Larry says.  Another issue is 
>that S-meters can be quite non-linear -- for example, my Mark 5 is (very 
>roughly) 2 dB per S Unit below S-9, and then fairly abruptly transitions 
>to ~6 dB per S-Unit.

I wouldn't use the s-meter.  I'd use a receiver with the AGC disabled and 
look at the audio output with a PC.  The PC lets you digitize the signal so 
you can measure in a very narrow bandwidth (helping the SNR), and is quite 
linear.

Just as a practical note, I ran BeaconSee (a NCDXF beacon monitoring 
program) for a while with an ICOM PCR-1000 receiver hooked up to a 30m band 
dipole a few feet off the ground.  I don't recall the detection bandwidth, 
but it's quite narrow.  You could see almost all beacons, at some time 
during the day.