The is a worldwide network of 18 beacons operated by the Northern California DX Foundation and the International Amateur Radio Union on 5 HF bands from 20m through 10m:
<http://www.ncdxf.org/beacons.html> At the moment, the beacons in Russia and Sri Lanka are down due to hardware problems; repairs are underway. Each beacon transmits for 10 seconds, giving its callsign in CW followed by four dashes: the first at 100 watts, the second at 10 watts, the third at 1 watt, and the fourth at 100 milliwatts: <<http://www.ncdxf.org/beacon/beaconschedule.html> By monitoring a beacon frequency for 3 minutes, you can assess actual propagation from your QTH on that band. Alternatively, you can construct a beacon schedule to quickly determine what bands are open to a particular area of the world from your QTH. Syncing your PC's time-of-day clock with an internet-accessible time service is recommended. The freeware DXLab Suite's PropView component lets you specify a set of beacons you wish to monitor and will direct the Commander component to QSY your transceiver to monitor them. You can select beacons individually, by band, or by bearing (octant) from your QTH. The PropView component will also generate graphical propagation forecasts using the VOACAP or ICEPAC engines, and use the beacon network to calibrate these forecasts. See <http://www.dxlabsuite.com/propview/> A list of other tools that can be used to monitor NCDXF/IARU beacons is provided in <http://www.ncdxf.org/beacon/beaconprograms.html> You can also assess propagation by using DXLab's WinWarbler component's broadband decoder to generate a "stations heard" list for all PSK31 transmissions heard on a particular band: <http://www.dxlabsuite.com/winwarbler/Heard.jpg> This approach depends on stations being QRV, which is not always the case when a band opening is underway. 73, Dave, AA6YQ -----Original Message----- From: digitalradio@yahoogroups.com [mailto:digitalra...@yahoogroups.com]on Behalf Of Gmail - Kevin, Natalia, Stacey & Rochelle Sent: Tuesday, October 20, 2009 4:05 PM To: digitalradio@yahoogroups.com Subject: [digitalradio] Throught of a Digital Propagation Tool Hi All, Just having a brain spark (not so many now-a-days) With all the new digital modes being devopled upto this date and the way some work; I was wondering if there could be some of propagation tool here? Thought would be some form of automation on spot frequecies on the different bands that cold record/monitor the propergation between continents. Of course this would require stations to dedicate their radio to this, but it could only be when the radio was not in operator use. I can remember quite a few years ago a ham friend who was a Amtor/Packet Sysop (using a PK-232) and he mentioned the band switching would allow him to get a good propagation view. But it was limited as it was setup for specific remote stations, he was not transferring to Asia or Europe, his hop was Austrailia and a couple of West Coast stations. It would require the software to control the scanning and switching of bands on the radio. Most radios that have scan functions, once switched to TX will not satrt scanning again. Thought would be to have the software scan each band at (say) 3 min intervals within a 30 min period, this would allow for slight differences in computer clocks. And then TX and monitor for 5 mins, recording any propergation traffic. Now I might be well off the mark here, just throwing something into the air for thoughts. Then the cycle woud start again. The data could then be uploaded to a central (online) monitoring database. The software could be configured to ignor certain calls for a band as this would swamp the reports. (I don't want to know ZL's (or even VK's) are being heard on 80 or 40mtrs, but I would like to know and report if Europe, Asia or the Americas are. Here is how I would see it mm - Band 00 - 160Mtrs 03 - 80Mtrs 06 - 40Mtrs 09 - 30Mtrs 12 - 20Mtrs 15 - 17Mtrs 18 - 15Mtrs 21 - 13Mtrs 24 - 10Mtrs 27 - 6Mtrs (Most new radios have this now) And then back to the top of the 30 min cycle again. I don't know what mode would be the best but I was thinking digital PSK31, but there could be a better digital mode. Anyway just some thoughts I had floating around and thought I would put it out there. I might be totally off the mark, but hey got to put things out there to think about. Thanks for Listening. Kevin, ZL1KFM.