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Trace: • QRSS

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QRSS

I've been running my QMX on WSPR, using its DigiMode and the USB interface to a laptop running WSJT-X, when I'm not using for real QSOs.

But I got to thinking “is that all there is?”

I've seen almost continuous QRSS signals on the WSJT-X waterfall on 30m while running WPSR, and I remembered running a grabber on 600m/500kHz back in the early days of access to that band, and I wondered what activity there still was using QRSS. So I looked around the 'net and found that the “QRSS Knights” group are still going and I wondered about joining it. It would give a more human interaction and more human use of the “down time” - I could still monitor propagation, but not using the computer to do everything… you still need to actively look at the waterfall and read the morse code from the noisy trace on the screen.

I've joined the Knights QRSS on groups.io https://groups.io/g/qrssknights and last night I set about getting a grabber up and running.

I settled on good old Spectrum Lab which I know has always worked well under Wine on Linux. After a bit of fiddling I got a working setup to display the “QRSS Watering Hole” on 30m, my band of interest, and then fiddled with some bash scripts to automate the “grab and upload” function to send images to my website. https://g4slv.info/

On this image from 10:20UTC today there are several QRSS signals….

From the top:

S52AB
G0PKT
M0BMN
G0MBA
G4JQT
IK2JET

I tried sending some QRSS at 1W this morning for an hour or so, but only saw the faintest of traces on the grabber of Fabian (DJ5CW) on his Polish-sited Grabber SO5CW which might have been me.

Once again, it seems that my quiet location is better for receive than transmit.

My grabber is now included on the grabber list at https://swharden.com/qrss/plus/ so let's see what appears on my screen.

I'll put some details of the simple bash scripts that do the uploads on the main wiki Radio pages, and add more info about QRSS there, when I get a chance.