LF: ZL3FJ 177 kHz beacon.

[Andre' Kesteloot]

David Brown wrote:

> In response to queries raised by Dave G3YXM, info as follows;
>
> The beacon is located at Gebbies Pass, an old broadcast AM radio
> transmitting site about 30 km from the city of Christchurch in the South
> Island.  This site still has two 300 foot self supporting lattice towers
> standing, although only for a few weeks more. End January is nominal date
> for tower dismantling but I am hoping for delays!
> Original tee flat top between the towers and the 300 foot vertical supported
> from its middle has long since gone unfortunately!
>  The beacon is using only one of these towers which had an emergency antenna
> arrangement of a wire from the transmitter building directly to the top of
> the tower, forming with the grounded tower a large loop or folded unipole.
> This is fed via an L match and low pass filter from the nominal 50 ohm tx
> output. Tx power out is around 50 watts. Could be more but is being under
> run in interests of reliability. (Final is four 6146 equivalents in
> parallel)
>
> Frequency is 177kHz, the drive source being an HP 3330B systhesiser,  just
> using its own internal quartz reference at the remote site but frequency
> accuracy should still be better than plus/minus 1 Hz. Keying sequence is
> three callsigns (ZL3FJ) at 10 wpm followed by a 5 second key down period,
> then a 6 second quiet period before the sequence repeats.
> I could drop the keying speed substantially if there is any serious DX
> interest. Being 2000 km from the nearest DX means that I have left it as
> above on basis that most listeners will be local (ie in ZL) so an aural CW
> ID (ie normal speed) seemed most appropriate.
>
> Reports so far are rock soild all round ZL, as expected. I also have 4
> reports from VK, where there are unfortunately only a handfull of LF
> interested listeners. Two from the 'lf regulars' in VK7, Richard VK7RO and
> Robert, VK7ZAL(who has the only VK LF transmitting permit at present, using
> the call AX2TAR) and two from further up the east coast of VK, one from the
> Victoria area and one from Queensland. So nothing startling DX wise but
> nevertheless interesting. Steve, VK2ZTO, in particular has been doing some
> interesting work with pc based DSP signal recovery techniques and has
> details of this on his web site. Check out the lowfer info at
> http://www.zeta.org.au/~ollaneg.
>
> 73
>  Dave, ZL3FJ