Skegness Log: 18-12-13 (FM)

Band 2 Tropospheric:
 94.4 0716  D  hr1, Großer Feldberg (Taunus)/hr (hes) Cher song, as web  648km
 94.6 0718  D  MDR 1 Radio Sachsen-Anhalt, Brocken (san) Pops, as web  713km
 94.8 0718  D  SWR3, Linz (Rhein)/Ginsterhahner Kopf (rlp) Light ops, as web  560km
 98.1 0721  D  WDR 3, Nordhelle (nrw) German YL, as web  554km
 98.7 0722  D  AFN Wiesbaden-The Eagle, Großer Feldberg (Taunus)/hr (hes) ID, phone
               number and Gloria Branigan track, Just about noise free  648km
104.8 0730 HOL Radio 1, Roermond/Alticom Toren (lim) Ads and clunky jingles  443km
100.0 0732  D  WDR 4, Münster/Baumberg (nrw) German pop, as web  494km
100.8 0733  D  WDR 2, Aachen/Stolberg (nrw) Noise free. Weather and ID  484km
103.0 0735  D  BFBS Radio, Bielefeld/Hünenburg (nrw) V weak but clearly as web stream  565km
107.1 0737  D  Deutschlandfunk (DLF), Bremen-Walle (bre) German OM, as web. Almost noise free  565km
107.0 0743  D  WDR Eins Live, Olsberg (nrw) Black Eyed Peas, as 106.7  592km
107.2 0743  D  WDR Eins Live, Ederkopf (nrw) Black Eyed Peas, as 106.7  593km
 88.0 0750  D  WDR 5, Bonn/Venusberg (nrw) Documentary? As web  538km
103.8 0809  D  WDR 4, Nordhelle (nrw) Light pops, as 101.3  554km
 97.0 0813  D  WDR 3, Teutoburger Wald/Bielstein (nrw) German YL, as web  591km
 99.0 0814  D  hr1, Hoher Meißner (hes) Rolling Stones Start Me Up, as web  684km
107.7 0816 LUX Den Neie Radio (DNR), Blaschette/Kandel (gld) Pops, as web  557km

** Personal Skegness 'First';

A spot of early morning DXing today!

I have been playing around with the source code of the i2c mod/Seeeduino board, now I have an idea how to do this. I reset all the antenna alignment figures to values which corresponded to the peaks i found with live adjustments across the band. So the XDR is now fully aligned across the band. Improvements are mostly very subtle but the default values were quite a way out in places. 61 to 63 is fairly typical and some of the values were set down as 53. The drop in signal is very noticeable when lowering these values from 61 to 53 but much more stable above, so 61 to 70 makes little difference.

I made a video of a quick band-sweep around 8am this morning and uploaded this to my YouTube channel. Scatter conditions were about average but there was a minor enhancement to south-east England. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8pCcG4JMmo

Good DX!

John Faulkner, Skegness, Lincolnshire (JO03dd) 1.7m (5'9") ASL.
Website: http://skegnessdx.blogspot.co.uk

Personal All Time VHF Logbooks: https://sites.google.com/site/skegnessdx/vhf-band-2-logs
VHF Band 2 DX Recordings: https://sites.google.com/site/skegnessdx/skegness-vhf-band-2-fm-dx-recordings

Receivers:
Sony XDR-F1HD with i2C mod. (tropospheric)
Kenwood KT6040 (sporadic E & meteor scatter)
Icom IC7000 (OIRT)
Conrad RDS Manager

Aerials:
Rooftop Körner 9.2, 8m AGL www.box.com/s/h1a5z3bu94vppln3zsfn
Yaesu G-5500 azimuthal/elevation rotator

Software:
RDS Spy v1.00r2 www.rdsspy.com