Due to an unfortunate coincidence, W1AW's CW broadcasts pretty much wipe out the 80m psk31 sub-band for a significant fraction of the time. To try and address this, I have sent the following open letter to W1AW at the ARRL, and also published it on my web site: http://surriel.com/radio/w1aw-psk-interference
-------- Original Message -------- Subject: W1AW and 80m psk31 interference Date: Tue, 22 Sep 2009 00:04:58 -0400 From: Rik van Riel To: w1aw To whom it may concern, The W1AW broadcasts are a great tradition and a help to some amateur radio operators, and do not seem to be in the way on most of the amateur radio bands. However, the W1AW CW broadcast on the 80 meter band, on 3581.5 kHz, is right in the middle of the psk31 sub band. Needless to say, a high power CW station pretty much wipes out the nearby psk31 signals, which are typically transmitted at low power. While strictly speaking it is legal to transmit CW anywhere on the band (I will not go into the legality of broadcasting on the ham bands), I believe we can agree that putting a strong signal right in the middle of a band segment dedicated to lower power operation is not what the ARRL's "Considerate Operator's Frequency Guide"[1] would call considerate. Because putting a high power CW broadcast in the middle of the psk31 sub band (which sees activity whenever there is propagation) is guaranteed to cause interference to active operators, I hope you would consider moving the W1AW CW broadcast to a frequency where interference is merely a possibility and not a guaranteed issue. The interference issue is especially severe due to the fact that the W1AW transmissions are scheduled on an almost daily basis, several times a day[2], wiping out the 80m psk31 subband for a significant fraction of the time. Since the W1AW CW broadcast is an automatically controlled transmission, maybe it would be better in the band segment assigned to automatically controlled data stations (3585-3590). Another good choice could be 3579.5 kHz, which would put the W1AW broadcast 500 Hz below the psk31 segment, just like it is on the 17 and 15 meter bands. kind regards, Rik van Riel, AB1KW [1] http://www.arrl.org/FandES/field/regulations/conop.html [2] http://www.arrl.org/w1aw.html#w1awsked
