To all intents and purposes you can say whatever band my Skimmer hears your signal its "similar" to how you would expect to be heard on Due to its location and orientation it is almost entirely omnidirectional.Īfter a number of years of comparing data it is so similar in performance to a resonant dipole that further improvement is unlikely. The antenna is a physically short active dipole which is horizontally polarised and 6m AGL.
#CW DECODER XP SOFTWARE SOFTWARE#
If you are connecting your logging software or DX cluster client you can use either VE7CC's cluster or one of the RBN DX cluster telnet connections. RBN data can be obtained freely by browsing to where you will find lots of information about this service. Surely this information which is being gathered world wide by many Skimmer operators should be made freely available to everyone for their own studies? Yes of course it must so we Skimmer operators post the data to the Reverse Beacon Network or RBN. We can see the effects of grey line propagation on the low bands and we can use it to learn. With care this can helpīy observing CW signals on 28MHz and 50MHz we can predict MUF from path length and also determine the location of Sporadic E clouds. It reports the signal to noise ratio (SNR) of stations it decodes or put simply how well you are being received. It can detect an open band even when we are not present and alert us to possibilities of DX paths. It is completely un biased - it has no friends! it spots everything it hears with no fear or favour. Listening to the entire CW sections of seven bands, all at the same time, 24 hours a day seven days a week opens up lots of propagation study opportunities.
#CW DECODER XP SOFTWARE PC#
It can watch seven bands at once if the PC is powerful enough. Firstly it can listen to as much as 192KHz of a band at once. The use of a local skimmer isn't that exciting to me, I can read CW myself and tune the bands looking for DX without any machine.ĬW skimmer when using a wideband receiver opens up some exciting possibilities. If you use logging software such as N1MM Logger you can use the telnet function to connect to this programme and it will receive the spots. The raw information which most amateurs refer to as "spots" looks a bit like this: You can use the data locally to determine what CW stations are transmitting and what frequency they are using. The information is displayed in a window of the software but can also be received by other software such as logging programmes that have telnet capabilities. The data decoded is in the form of text, very similar to the information you receive from the DX Cluster.
What happens to the data that a CW skimmer decodes? Once decoded this clever software determines things such as the frequency of transmission, the speed in words per minute and the absolute signal to noise ratio that the receiver detected.
which are phrases commonly used by amateur radio CW operators. The decoded signals are validated as messages being in a particular format, looking for things like CQ DE N4ZR or GW8IZR TEST etc. The software which runs on a PC is effectively a CW (Morse code) decoder which is capable of simultaneously decoding many hundreds of CW signals in real time. I'm always willing to listen to polite feedback on the performance of my Skimmer - good and bad, but please try to understand the limitations before you complain.ĬW Skimmer is the name of a software package written by Alex Shovkoplyas, VE3NEA. The last sections detail my receiver setup, my antenna and perhaps the notes about limitations may be of interest. If you already have a good understanding of the principles involved the first parts won't be of much interest but Here are some notes to try to help users understand what this talk of CW Skimmers and the RBN is about.
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