I wrote this software because i wanted to build a 30m qrss grabber for weak signal extraction experimentation but was dissatisfied by the limitations placed on my creativity by currentlyavailable spectrograph software commonly used for qrss. Power from the laptop, and audio back to the laptop. The transmitter used was the same one i took with me to grenda, caribbean. We have a number of patents in the field of expert searching, fuzzy matching and intelligent parsing of internet data, which give users of our tools a competitive. Wspr and qrss frequencies g6nhus occasional qrss grabber. To put it quite simply, the qrss mode is the transmission and reception of slow speed morse transmissions a. Full details of larrys end of the operation are available from wb3anq. Author mark vandewettering posted on 152012 categories amateur radio, qrss. The computer used for the spectrum analyzer is a raspberry pi 3 running lopora software. Fft processing and display software is pa2ohhs excellent analysis program lopora.
Most of them are on the 30m frequency band 10,140,000. Qrss plus automatically updating active qrss grabbers list. Update grabber information by following instructions on the qrss plus github page. Im currently seeing myself on the la5goa grabber in norway so i know its at least getting that far and thats just on my random length doublet through an sgc smartuner. Qrplabs qcx transceiver used as the receiver, the antenna is a butternut hf9v all band vertical. Both of these programs will display a waterfall at various speeds. The installation and setup of argo was very straightforward and using the existing digimode interface i was receiving qrss signals on 30m. This beacon is in the 30m 10mhz amateur radio band and this band was chosen because of a few reasons. The average grabber make use of the typical commercial providers. The receiver therefore sits directly at the centre point of the dipole, i. Added led to indicate capture status, clickable to change it dialog for recomputing screenfull time when changing qrss mode or speed the calibration function has been split for the horizontal and vertical scrolling modes.
Here is a snapshot from my qrss grabber earlier today. The qrss archiver is a tiny command line application that i have developed in order to solve the problem of the manual online grabber check and covert it to an automatic archiving process. It is intended to be used for slow morse qrss operation. The board uses an attiny85 by atmel, and runs software which allows it to appear as a usb device.
Last night the last piece of the puzzle fell into place and my 30m qcx grabber is on the web. The most popular band currently used for qrss is 30m with all activity confined to a 100hz segment starting at 10. Qrss plus watches a list of image urls stored in grabbers. It doesnt have any way of automatically uploading the images to the web server, though. Since moving to my current place, ive had a length of wire taped to my 32 foot fiberglass mast tuned against a ground consisting of a cold water pipe which i have recently discovered might not be connected to ground very well, if at all. Image of current view of wa5djj qrss super grabber in las cruces,nm. I did not adjust the transmitter at all between these two dxpeditions, so hoped the frequency would remain as per the caribbean operation i. I was off searching through my junk boxes there are more than one here trying to find the parts to build my own qrss mept and really see if all the claims of long distance signal detection was true. Please check the active grabbers before you transmit to find a clear spot and because its so busy, please think very carefully before you run slow hell on 30m. I wrote this software because i wanted to build a 30m qrss grabber for weak signal extraction experimentation but was dissatisfied by the limitations placed. The 40m qrss frequency has been selected as its directly below the wspr frequency, allowing for grabbers to run both wspr and qrss simultaneously. Dec 25, 2018 i am fortunate in having a local qrss station about 10 miles north of my qth. Oct 23, 2010 qrss on 30m and my new dipole im not sure at what point qrss came into sharp focus for me, but it represents quite a logical step given my interest in qrp.
The red dots show the existing operating qrss 247 grabbers. Paolos receiver was based on a 1997 qst article by daniel wissell, n1ybt. Automaticallyupdating active qrss grabber list by scott harden. Use listgrabber, a lead generation software, to extract lead lists and prospect lists from free lead sources on the internet. The board will generate an rf signal on any of the hf bands, which encodes wspr, fskcw and qrq cw beacon messages, derived from personal details which you store in the software. Using the ft817 with a 30m loop antenna, the grabber is set to monitor the low band qrss frequency on 40m, 7000.
On the 9th january, 2011 a qrss beacon was installed at the martello tower using the callsign g0pkt. G0pkt qrss beacon and grabber martello tower group. During the november 2018 leonids meteor shower we used the 17 and 30m qrss bands to look for meteor pings. Jul 04, 2019 i am fortunate in having a local qrss station about 10 miles north of my qth. Easy way to put up a qrss grabber inside dropbox that autoupdates. Click here to read about the construction and the caribbean operation. Regular reports of my grabber activity and that of others, plus information on qrss software, hardware and technique that comes my way. The local copy of the signal using my 30m qrss receiver is shown above right. Dfcw dfcw means dual frequency cw and is a combination of qrss and fskcw.
Update grabber information by following instructions on the qrss. Mar 30, 2011 there was a gap of a few hours in the middle of the night when the software had locked up but apart from that it worked really well. On other bands you may need to supply a suitable crystal for. Figure 1 is from my 30m grabber showing the fskcw signal from kd5ssf along with a typical meteor ping and airplane reflection. The whole setup with linux, the distribution jolicloud is used here, installing jolicloud, wine and spectumlab took a few hours from a purely xp machine to a running grabber. Qrss trxs for 40m and 20m cheap single channel qrss gear with my 30m d. These tones can be fed into the microphone input of an ssb transmitter in order to transmit a very narrow bandwidth less than 10 hz coded signal.
Dec 15, 2009 the grabber software runs on a eeepc h, and was running the grabber the past few days in windows xp. The equipment configuration consists of a qrplabs 30m qcx transceiver used as the grabber s receiver with no,modifications. This will allow the transmissions to adapt according to solar and battery power levels this is still a work in progress. I now have qrsswspr grabbers on 160m, 80m, 40m, 30m, 20m, 17m, 15m, 12m and 10m. In the lf band of 6khz where the most common used mode is qrss3, a very basic qso will take about 30 minutes. It has been off for about three years, lacking the bits and pieces that make it all work easily and maybe my lack of trying. Qrss provides a quite good weak signal performance, so it is usable for propagation monitoring, provided that there are some qrss transmitters active. The grabber a snapshot is taken every time the screen fills by the argo software, v1 build 145 by. The wspr pronounced whisper capture shown above is a recent development in the world of qrss which uses software running on a pc to generate a number of audio tones with frequency spacing of only a few hertz.
The 30m qrss transmitter kit ordered i sat back and figured that while waiting for the kit to arrive from the uk, it might be useful if i had an antenna for 30m. Apr 11, 20 a software for grabbing data from a pc to your usb storage without asking any question and any permission as soon as you plug it to usb port. We have previously had moderately good success on 17 and 20m and our. I drilled two small holes in the sides of the tin, and fed through 7stranded wire as the two arms of the 30m dipole. This morning i checked w4hbks grabber and was pleased to see my signal getting into pensacola, fl see 10140020hz in the image above. K6hx qrss grabber for fun, ive got my new rfspace sdriq running on my laptop using spectrum lab and monitoring the 30m qrss beacon subband. The qrss vd grabber automatically captures the live waterfall and creates images suitable for uploading to a website so others can see whether you are receiving their signals. At the present time, the 30m receiver is one of the icom r75. Your screen should now appear similar to the image below argos various additional functions can now be explored. Qrss is a slow morse, weak signal mode capable of worldwide hf propagation using a fraction of a watt of rf. Wa5djj30m david wa5djj in las cruces, new mexico website.
In this section, i will discuss software for microsoft windows based computers only. In the following sections, i would to demonstrate a couple of options one has to build a qrss online. As such the design surely isnt perfect, and the construction a bit messy. Here are some recent screen grabs from the mm0ler grabber in the north of scotland. Qrss plus displays a list of active grabbers on a web page making them easy to browse at a glance. Located at new mexico state university las cruces, new mexico 88011 grid square dm62ph. Some software changes has been made to reduce the duty cycle. Listening to him telling about his adventures with qrss, the bug bit me big time.
This is the start of a bigger system to cover qrss segments on all amateur bands. This free program is a product of scott harden, aj4vd. Therefore on 30m the kit can be used as a standalone wspr transmitter. Since 1996 egrabber has been inventing business processes that simplify internet research. You will probably wish to activate argos screen capture facility once you start seeing a few qrss signals appearing on argos screen.
To view qrss plus program output useful for debugging view the source of this page. My 30m propeller beacon is now on the air, a low pass filter was built and attached at the output pin and ground. For some notes about the optimal use of argo, look here. Argo is a program very similar to spectran except that also has screen capture capabilities but no realtime audio filtering. Jul 10, 2009 some software changes has been made to reduce the duty cycle. The rtlsdr is an ultra cheap software defined radio. Ill keep the grabber up for the rest of the week, perhaps down only intermittently to tweak the software, and then ill shift to transmit over the weekend with my g0upl beacon. The signal arrives via ground wave and is of moderate strength so as not to overload the waterfall display of my 30m grabber. After reading about julians qrss activities i decided to put my 30m qrss beacon back on the air which has had a break for a few months. A multimode qrss beacon a dds on the internet of things.
I have had good luck using spectran see the link below for qrss. Last time i was running a qrss grabber was before the time of the low cost raspberry pi single board computer, but these days it is an excellent candidate for running grabber software. The inspiration for this project was paolo iz1kxq, who used a simple sa602based homebrew direct conversion receiver to produce some very nice qrss reception reports, of my junkbox qrss beacon and others. The qrss archiver accepts as command line parameters. I had done something similar a long time ago, long enough that i had forgotten the basics and needed to revisit the software, radio settings etc. Qrss psk8 hell and other low frequency software category is a curation of 16 web resources on, wspr, baudline signal analyzer, spectran. Qrss grabber i was invited to join in on some tests to report how well or if at all a low power mept manned experimental propagation transmitter beacon was being received at my location. Wa5djjs qrss all band grabber had some real dx this week. A couple of years ago, i remember finding out about illegal unlicensed low power hf beacons as opposed to the legal unlicensed hifer beacons and even hearing a few. In order to allow for those frequencies, i will drop in a 14. Im now quite looking forward to getting my 30m qrss transmitter repaired and seeing how well thatll work. I designed, built and debugged this 30m qrss beacon in 2 hours, from 3 oclock a.
May 23, 2015 i positioned its signal in the middle of a bunch of qrss signals as received by my ic735, so it should be within the qrss subband on 30m, but my ic735 itself is rather poorly calibrated off by 150 hz or so so im not as yet certain of its exact frequency. Introduction thank you for purchasing my qrss arduino shield beacon kit. This week the wa5djj qrss all band grabber, which was built with qrplabs qcx transceivers modified to be receivers, a sound card dongle and a raspberry pi running lopora version 5a software designed by pa20hh and operates on the amateur radio bands of 160m, 80m, 60m, 40m, 30m, 20m, 17m, 15m, 12m and 10m, had a couple of really interesting. Image of the current 30m qrsswspr grabber 20 min spectrum capture. With a reasonable dipole antenna worldwide reception on 30m and perhaps 40m and 80m. Qrss vd is a free, opensource, crossplatform qrss spectrograph and spectrogram analyzer written entirely in python distributed as source.
Grabber files are output as files in each window, starting hf1, hf2, hf3, hf4 plus a time and date stamp. Qrss isnt so instantly gratifying as wspr but its another good propagation testing mode so im keen to see how well it works. The basic idea will follow the 30m polyakov design, just not using a canned oscillator this time. Contribute to swhardenqrssplus development by creating an account on github. Spectrum grabbers are an essential part of the qrssgame. This week the wa5djj qrss all band grabber, which was built with qrplabs qcx transceivers modified to be receivers, a sound card dongle and a raspberry pi running lopora version 5a software designed by pa20hh and operates on the amateur radio bands of 160m, 80m, 60m, 40m, 30m, 20m, 17m, 15m, 12m and 10m, had a couple of really interesting signals appear on its 20m and 15m grabbers. To show how well it worked, heres the database of spots both seen and heard during the day. Listgrabber is a lead generation software that enables you to capture name, company mailing address, email, phone and fax number, etc.
My 30m qrss grabber is back online finally, my 30m qrss grabber is back online. I wrote this software because i wanted to build a 30m qrss grabber for weak signal extraction. This will be serving as a grabber receiver for the upper qrss frequency 3599900hz as well as the color burst frequency 3579545hz. Qrsspig is a qrss grabber program that runs headless on a raspberry pi and can interface with an rtlsdr. Qrss amateur vlf operating mode category is a curation of 25 web resources on, 30m qrss receiver, 30 meters receiver, i2ndt qrss listenings.
Hardware changes now allow the software to monitor the battery and solar cell voltages. The sketch o operates the m0xpd kanga esp8266 ad9834 board as a multimode beacon controller. Firstly, there are quite a lot of grabbers active on 30m. It automatically generates the waterfall graphs of received qrss images, and supports uploading them via scp or ftp. Hamview is a freeware software to dig out weak signals buried in noise. However, other solutions are conceivable, such as high speed packet radio. The equipment configuration consists of a qrplabs 30m qcx transceiver used as the grabbers receiver with no,modifications.
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