My single HF antenna (a ZS6BKW) is pretty good for multi-band use, but it is fairly lacking in the 30 meter department. So any 30 meter OpenBeacon captures that I’ve been getting have been pretty exciting to me, given that I’m running 300 mW maximum power out of the transmitter. God only knows what my EIRP is. So far all of my captures have been from North Amercian grabbers, so I’ve been craving that magical “across the pond” capture from a far away land (as a side note, why does there appear to be virtually no functioning grabbers in Asia?).

Tonight, I finally got that capture. Two days ago, I implemented QRSS and DFCW (dual-frequency CW) modes with a very long dit time of 120 seconds. This is to allow a very weak signal to be integrated over a long period, such as the 6-hour grabbers available from the few fine hams who provide them. Last night, wasn’t able to get any coherent signals from the most reliable grabber for me, the W4HBK “Pensacola Snapper”, but I could see traces of my signal present. Tonight I turned on my OpenBeacon a bit earlier in the evening and was rewarded with a very nice capture from ZL2IK after waiting about four hours.

You can see my DFCW signal right in the middle near 10.140.000 Hz, with a bit of upward drift as I opened the door to my shack midway through the transmission. As you can probably tell, all of the other visible signals are meant for much shorter capture periods, so you can’t distinguish any callsign information from them in this long capture.

For those folks with actual decent antennas for their band of choice, this mode will allow them to really push the limits of QRPp. The OpenBeacon output power can be adjusted to somewhere around 20 mW, and with in-line attenuators, the noise floor is the limit. It will be fun to see if some people take up the challenge of very QRPp operation when OpenBeacon gets to market soon.

30 Mar 2012 Edit: Here are some more captures from today. The first is from N9VN (thanks Vince!) and the second is from the Pensacola Snapper.