Whilst wandering around the 2016 G-QRP Convention at Rishworth with Richard G0GLZ, I spotted a box on one of the stalls, and having talked to the stallholder established it was a QRSS (very slow Morse) beacon transmitter that had at one time been used in Senegal in West Africa. At this point I decided that perhaps this project wasn't for me, it was promptly bought (partly on my behalf) by Richard G0GLZ - I did consider "The one that got away" as the title of this entry...
Although the manufacturer appears to have retired the OpenBeacon kit and have removed it from their website, the documentation and driver software are still available from http://etherkit.github.io/openbeacon_landing_page.html. As the name suggests, the OpenBeacon is an open-source beacon transmitter that is capable of transmitting a variety of modes which include QRSS, DFCW, Sequential Multi-tone Hellschreiber and WSPR.
The first challenge for this project was the installation of the unsigned driver software under Windows 10 Advanced Boot Menu, which required a change to the startup settings in order to disable Driver Signature Enforcement, several reboots later with the driver successfully installed, I was then able get the settings showing the previous callsign of 6W7RV.
Looking up the locator IK14LL on http://qthlocator.free.fr/index.php, it appears to be almost as West as it is possible to be and still be in Africa; and from the QRZ.com database, the callsign once belonged to a holiday rental "shack" located in a Wildlife Reserve with its own lagoon and Baobab forest (sorry, no pictures I'm afraid).
Finally, back to my own shack, after connecting the beacon up to a 50Ω dummy load (a BNC thin-wire Ethernet terminator in its previous life) and was able to hear the beacon transmission on my FT-817.
No comments:
Post a Comment