Monitoring the "CT" MedFER beacon from "Eclipse land"

Figure 1:
The MedFER beacon and vertical, tophatted
antenna on the metal roof of my house, attached
to an evaporative ("swamp") cooler.
Click on the image for a larger version.

I must admit that I was "part of the problem" - that is, one of the hordes of people that went north to view the August 21, 2017 eclipse along its line of totality.  In my case I left my home near Salt Lake City, Utah on the Friday before at about 4AM, arriving 4 hours and 10 minutes later - this, after a couple of rest and fuel stops.  On the return trip I waited until 9:30 AM on the Wednesday after, a trip that also took almost exactly 4 hours and 10 minutes, including a stop or two - and I had no traffic in either case.

This post isn't about my eclipse experiences, though, but rather the receiving of my "MedFER" beacon at a distance of about 230 miles (approx. 370km) as a crow flies.

What's a MedFER beacon?

In a previous post I described a stand-alone PSK31 beacon operating just below 1705 kHz at the very top of the AM broadcast ("Mediumwave") band under FCC Part 15 §219 (read those rules here).  This portion of the FCC rules allow the operation of a transmitter on any frequency (barring interference) between 510 and 1705 kHz with an input power of 100 milliwatts using an antenna that is no longer than 3 meters, "including ground lead."  By operating just below the very top of the allowed frequency range I could maximize my antenna's efficiency and place my signal as far away from the sidebands and splatter of the few stations (seven in the U.S. and Mexico) that operate on 1700 kHz.

Figure 2:
Inside the loading coil, showing the variometer, used to fine-
tune the inductance to bring the antenna system to
resonance.  This coil is mounted in a plastic 5-gallon
bucket, inverted, to protect it from weather.

As described in the article linked above, this beacon uses a Class-E output amplifier which allows more than 90% of its DC input power to be delivered as RF, making the most of the 100 milliwatt restriction of the input power.  To maximize the efficiency of the antenna system a large loading coil with a variometer is used, wound using copper tubing, to counteract the reactance of the antenna.  The antenna itself is two pieces:  A section, 1 meter long, mounted to the evaporative cooler sitting on and connected to the metal roof of my house and above that, isolated from the bottom section is an additional 2-meter long section that is tophatted to increase the capacitance and reduce the required amount of loading inductance to improve overall efficiency.

As it happens, the antenna is mounted in almost exactly the center of the metal roof of my house so one of the main sources of loss - the ground - is significantly reduced, but even with all of this effort the measured feedpoint resistance is between 13 and 17 ohms implying an overall antenna efficiency of just a few percent at most.

Figure 3:
The tophatted vertical antenna, loading coil and transmitter, looking up
from the base.  In the extreme foreground along the left side of the
picture can be part of the weather-resistant metal box that
contains the transmitter.
Click on the image for a larger version.

Originally intended only as a PSK31 beacon, I later added the capability of operating on 1700 kHz using AM and being able to do on/off keying of the carrier at the original "1705" kHz PSK31 frequency, permitting the transmission of Morse code messages.  For the purpose of maximizing the likelihood of the signal being detected, this last mode - Morse - I operate using "QRSS3", a "Slow" Morse sending speed where the "dit" length of the characters is being transmitted is 3 seconds - as is the space between character elements - and a "dah" and the space between characters themselves is 9 seconds.

Sending Morse code at such a low speed allows sub-Hz detection bandwidths to be used, greatly improving the rejection of other signals and increasing the probability that the possibly-minute amount of energy reaching the receive antenna may be detected.

Detecting it from afar:

Even though this beacon had been "received" as far away as Vancouver, BC (about 800 miles, or 1300 km) using QRSS during deep, winter nights, I was curious if I could hear it during a summer night near Moore, ID at that 230 mile (370km) distance.  Because we were "camping" in a friend's yard, we (Ron, K7RJ and I) had to put up an antenna to receive the signal.

The first first antenna that we put up received strong AC mains-related noise - likely because it paralleled the power line along the road.  Re-stringing the same 125-ish feet (about 37 meters) of antenna wire at a right angle to the power line and stretching out a counterpoise along the ground got better results:  Somewhat less power line noise.  It was quickly discovered that I needed to run both the receiver and the laptop on battery as any connection to the power line seemed to conduct noise into the receiver - probably a combination of noise already on the power line as well as the low-level harmonics of the computer's switching power supply.

I'd originally tried using my SDR-14 receiver, but I soon realized that between the rather low signal levels being intercepted by the wire - which was only about 10 feet (3 meters) off the ground - and the relative insensitivity of this device, I wasn't able to "drive" its A/D converter very hard, resulting in considerable "dilution" of the received signals due to quantization noise.  In other words, it was probably only using 2-4  bits of the device's 14 bit A/D converter!

I then switched to my FT-817 (with a TCXO known to be accurate to better than one part-per-million) which had no troubling "hearing" the background noise.  Feeding the output of the '817 into an external 24 bit USB sound card (the sound card input of my fairly high-end laptop - as with most laptops - is really "sucky") I did a "sanity check" of the frequency calibration of the FT-817 and the sound card's sample rate using the 10 MHz WWV signal and found it to be within a Hertz of the correct frequency and then re-tuned the receiver to 1704.00 kHz using upper-sideband.  It had been several years since I'd measured the precise frequency of my MedFER beacon's carrier, last being observed at 1704.966 kHz, so I knew that it would be "pretty close" to that value - but I wasn't sure how much its crystal might have drifted over time.

For the signal analysis I used both "Spectrum Lab" by DL4YHF (link here) and the "Argo" program by I2PHD (link here).  Spectrum Lab is a general-purpose spectral analysis program with a lot of configurability which means that there are a lot of "knobs" to tweak, but Argo is purposely designed for modes like QRSS using optimized, built-in presets and it was via Argo that I first spotted some suspiciously coherent signals at an audio frequency of between 978 and 980 Hz, corresponding to an RF carrier frequency of 1704.978 to 1704.980 kHz - a bit higher than I'd expected.

As we watched the screen we could see a line appear and disappear with the QSB (fading) and we finally got a segment that was strong enough to discern the callsign that I was sending - my initials "CT".

Figure 4
An annotated screen capture of a brief reception, about 45 minutes after local sunset, of the "CT" beacon using QRSS3 with the "oldest" signals at the left.  As can be seen, the signal fades in so that the "T" of a previous ID, a complete "CT" and a partial "C" and a final "T" can be seen on the far right.  Along the top of the screen we see that ARGO is reporting the peak signals to be at an audio frequency of 978.82 Hz which, assuming that the FT-817 is accurately tuned to 1704.00 kHz indicates an actual transmit frequency of about 1704.979 kHz.

As we continued to watch the ARGO display now and again we could see the signal fade in and out and be occasionally clobbered by the sidebands of an AM radio station on 1700 kHz - at least until something was turned on in a nearby house that put interference everywhere around the receive frequency.

The original plan:

The main reason for leaving the MedFER beacon on the air during the eclipse and going through the trouble of setting up an antenna was to see if, during the depth of the eclipse, its signal popped up, out of the noise - the idea being that the ionospheric "D" layer would disassociate in the temporary darkness along the path between my home where the eclipse would attain about 91% totality and the receive location within the path of totality, hoping that its signal would emerge.  In preparation for this I set up the receiver and the ARGO program to automatically capture - and then re-checked it about 5 minutes before totality.

Unfortunately, while I'd properly set up ARGO to capture, I'd not noticed that I'd failed to click on the "Start Capturing" button in ARGO and the computer happily ran unattended until, perhaps, 20 minutes after totality, so I have no way of knowing if the signal did pop up during that time.  I do know that when I'd checked on it a few minutes before totality there was no sign of the "CT" beacon on the display.

In retrospect, I should have done several things differently:

• Brought a shielded "H" loop that would offer a bit of receive signal directionality and the ability to reject some of the locally-generated noise and would have saved us the hassle of stringing hundreds of feet of wire through trees.  Some amplification with this loop would also have helped the SDR-14 work properly.  Alternatively, a simple active whip (such as a PA0RDT "mini-whip") could have been built and used, its location chosen for lowest noise pick-up.
• Actually checked to make certain that the screen capture was activated!
• Record the entire event to an uncompressed audio (e.g. ".WAV") file so that it could be re-analyzed later.

 Oh well, you live and learn!

P.S.  After I returned I measured the carrier frequency of the MedFER beacon using a GPS-locked frequency reference and found it to be 1704.979 kHz - just what was measured from afar!

[End]

This information stolen from ka7oei.blogspot.com

A low power PSK31 transmitter using a Class-E power amplifier and envelope modulation

Back in 1999, not too long after the first appearance of PSK31, I decided that I wanted to construct a beacon transmitter that would operate using this mode - but at the time the only practical means of generating PSK31 was with a computer, a sound card and an SSB transmitter.  Not wanting to tie up that much gear for this purpose I set about to use the PIC16C84 microcontroller, which was popular among the homebrew builders at the time.

By this time the AM broadcast band had (relatively) recently been expanded up to 1705 kHz but very few stations occupied the new 1605-1705 kHz segment.  In perusing the FCC rules I noted that Part 15 §219 had been modified to allow low-power experimental operation (100 milliwatts DC input with a size-limited antenna) in this new segment and I decided that with the lack of activity in this frequency range that it was a good time to put up a "MedFER" (Medium Frequency Experimental Radio) beacon.

Figure 1:
The "Balanced Modulator" (Baseband) version of the PSK31
transmitter/exciter.  Built to test a concept, it has a few flaws,
but it did work.
Click on the image for a larger version.

The balanced modulator method

Upon investigating various methods of producing a PSK31 signal I experimented with the generation of a bipolar baseband signal that could be applied directly to a balanced mixer.  While this method worked well it had the problem than it required that all following stages be linear.

A diagram of the prototype of that transmitter may be seen in Figure 1.  For this transmitter a crystal-controlled oscillator is constructed using two transistors (Q1, Q2) and the output is buffered by U3, a 74HC00 quad NAND gate.  The frequency used for this circuit was unimportant as it was a "proof of concept" and I (think that I) used a 4.9152 MHz crystal which, although not in any amateur band, still allowed an "across the room" reception with a short length of wire as an antenna.  Following the first U3 NAND buffer the remaining sections are used to provide a two phase signal with the output split 180 degrees which fed a very simple balanced modulator consisting of just two diodes, a few capacitors and some resistors.

To provide modulation a PIC16C84 was used to provide a 32-step staircase modulation using PWM techniques as this (now ancient) part had no PWM peripherals.  This PWM output, done using "bit-bang" software with a "NOP-tuned" interrupt service routine operated at a frequency of 1 kHz, which is exactly 32 times that of PSK31's 31.25 Hz baseband frequency.  The output was filtered with a two stage R/C low-pass filter network consisting first of a 4.7k resistor and 0.1uF capacitor followed by a second stage with a much higher impedance consisting of a 150k resistor and 0.033uF capacitor providing around 3dB of roll-off at the 31.25Hz baseband frequency and about 40dB of attenuation at the 1 kHz PWM rate while yielding an acceptable amount of Inter-Symbol Interference ("ISI").  The result of this filtering is that the vast majority of the 1kHz energy is removed, leaving a pretty clean 31.25 Hz baseband signal.

Figure 2:
Phase diagram of balanced modulator
circuit in Figure 1.  The propagation
delay of the gates result in a rather
imprecise 180 degree phase shift
causing the upside-down "Vee"
in the phase diagram.

The filtered PWM output was then buffered and split into two signals, one of them inverted, using several op-amp sections and these two signals are applied differentially via simple R/C networks across the two diodes:  If the baseband signal from the PWM output were to go "positive" (e.g. above the mid-supply voltage)  the other side would go "negative" and turn on one diode, but it if were to swing the other way the other diode - fed with an RF signal 180 degrees out of phase with the first - would be turned on.  The end result is a fairly nice, linear BPSK envelope and baseband waveform when viewed on a receiver connected to an oscilloscope.

While it worked to prove a concept, this signal has a few shortcomings.  First, the RF signal from the oscillator and buffer is not likely to have a precise 50% duty cycle (unless it is digitally divided from a higher frequency) which means that a bit more RF energy would be available in one phase than the other, resulting in a somewhat "lopsided" BPSK amplitude envelope - a trait that only minimally affects demodulation and overall signal quality if the difference is only 10-20% (e.g. a dB or so).  The other problem has to do with a NAND gate being used to provide the 180 degree phase shift (e.g. signal inversion) in that the addition of the inverting gate adds a few 10s of nanoseconds of propagation delay.  While this doesn't sound like much, it does amount to a significant number of degrees of phase even at low HF frequencies and the end result is that the "Phase Diagram" is slightly distorted and produces the inverted "vee" pattern as seen in Figure 2.

While I could have gotten this method to work (e.g. used a bandpass/lowpass filter to get a nice, clean sine wave and a transformer or digital divider to get the 180 degree phase shift) it does have a down side:  All subsequent stages would need to be linear.  While not a great technical problem it did mean that for the MedFER transmitter, which has a 100 milliwatt DC input power limit according to FCC rules, a linear final amplifier would have at best around 70% efficiency which would mean that I'd lose a bit more than 1dB of signal over an amplifier that was 100% efficient.  While this may not sound like much I figured that I could do better with a more efficient amplifier scheme.

Comment:

This "baseband" PSK31 signal produced using the differential op amp scheme noted above was successfully applied experimentally to some "digital only" radios such as the Small Wonder Labs "PSK" series.  This was accomplished by "lifting" the balanced modulator above DC ground via capacitive RF coupling and applying the modulation differentially to the diode ring mixer's IF port and its ground and shifting the carrier oscillator to move this "DC" signal into the crystal filter's baseband.

The pages linked near the end of this article provide details on this modification.

The Amplitude Modulator Method

Having proven the ability to produce a reasonable quality PSK31 waveform with a lowly PIC I decided to try a different approach:  Apply high-level modulation to the output amplifier stage.  What's more, this amplifier stage need not be linear at all:  It could be a conventional Class C stage which could boost the efficiency to something around 80%, but I decided on going a step farther and use a Class-E amplifier.

Figure 3:
Diagram of the "AM" version of the transmitter using separate amplitude
and phase modulation paths, allowing a non-linear but highly efficient
Class-E output amplifier to be used.  The capacitor, diode and resistor
on the gate of Q1, the output transistor, are used to prevent the FET
from being stuck "on" and shorting out the power supply should
the RF drive disappear for any reason and the output of the NAND
gate driving it be left in a "high" state.
Click on the image for a larger version.

I first became aware of the Class-E amplifier more than a decade earlier when my friend Mark, WB7CAK, designed one for his LowFER (Low Frequency Experimental Radio) beacon that operated in the 160-190 kHz "experimenter's" band, authorized by §217 of FCC part 15.  As with MedFER operation, the input power was also limited - 1 watt in this case - also with a size-limited antenna.  After a bit of number crunching and fiddling on the workbench Mark came up with a simple circuit and a few basic, simplified equations that described how such an amplifier could be built and published an article in the Western Update - a small publication tailored mostly for LowFERs.  Because this publication may be difficult to find I have reproduced it with permission from the author and it may be found here:  (Link).

While the maths behind the derivation of the operation of a Class-E amplifier can be somewhat involved, the concept is quite simple:  When the drive signal to the transistor - typically a power MOSFET at LowFER frequencies - goes low, the transistor shuts off and it does this quickly (e.g. driven "hard") so that transistor spends as little time as possible "partially" conducting between "on" and "off" states.  When the transistor turns off, the voltage on the drain rises, being pulled up by the choke in the circuit, but it then falls again due the "ringing" of a resonant circuit on the output tank.  Because this tank circuit is tuned appropriately, precisely at the time that the drain voltage hits zero again because of this "ringing" the output transistor is switched back on.

The result of these two events is that the FET is either completely on or off which means that little or no power is dissipated in it.  What's more, when the FET is (quickly!) turned back on, it does so just as the voltage happens to swing to zero, practically eliminating any losses that would occur at that instant due to the intrinsic resistance of the FET absorbing the current, and from other losses of components of the tank circuit being "shorted out" had voltage been present.

Figure 4:
The constructed MedFER beacon transmitter, built on the bottom
of a weather resistant outdoor enclosure to be mounted at the base
of the antenna.

The result of all of this is an RF amplifier that (exclusive of the drive signal) is demonstrably capable of 95%-98% efficiency!  In the MedFER and LowFER world this means that with our power level being limited on the input, we will have, for all practical purposes, all of our input  power at our disposal rather than, say, 70-80% of it as would be the case with almost any other amplifier type - a gain of about 1dB.

The obvious problem with a Class-E amplifier is that the drive signal must be a fast rising/falling square-shaped wave that slams the transistor on and off which means that amplitude modulation of that drive signal is not easily managed if efficiency is to be maintained.

What one can do is to modulate the power supply feeding the amplifier instead.

Remembering that a PSK31 signal consists of two parts - the amplitude modulation and the phase shift - we can split these two signals in the modulator.  The first part, amplitude modulation,  may be done by varying the supply voltage of the output amplifier stage.  The second part, phase modulation, may also be done early in the path of the drive signal simply by flipping the phase of the RF signal under computer control.  In order to keep the signal "clean" all we really need to do is to time the flipping of the phase with the amplitude being brought to zero so that we don't transmit the broadband "click" that would otherwise occur when we did this abrupt phase shift.  The schematic of this transmitter is depicted in Figure 3.

Figure 5:
The phase diagram of the signal
produced by the "Amplitude
Modulator" MedFER PSK31
beacon transmitter.  The phase
shift is precise and the intermodulation
products are well within the tolernaces
dictated by good operating practice.

In this circuit the frequency-determining crystal oscillator operates at four times the transmitter frequency, or around 6.8 MHz in the case of the MedFER transmitter.  During construction it was observed that at around 1.7 MHz it was was easier to achieve Class-E operation at this power level with a drive waveform that had a 25% duty cycle so a 74HC4017 counter was used, wired as a divide-by-four giving two 25% duty cycle outputs, 180 degrees apart.  To select which of these signals were to be used a simple MUX and driver was constructed using four NAND gates, this time being designed so that the same amount of propagation delay would occur during either phase to eliminate the upside-down "Vee" seen in Figure 2.

The PWM signal was generated using simple R/C filtering in the same way as it was for the balanced modulator circuit, but this time op amps were used to set the offset and gain (or "span") so that the baseband waveform could be precisely adjusted in amplitude and so that when the baseband signal went to zero, the output power from the Class-E circuit would as well, compensating for the voltage offset of the series modulating transistor, emitter-follower Q4.  The output transistor, Q3, is a low-power MOSFET wired into a simple L/C "tank" circuit that is tuned to result in the coincidence of the zero crossing of the drain voltage and the transistor being turned back on by the 25% duty cycle drive signal.  Multiple taps are provided on the tank coil, making it easy to set both the output power and match it appropriately to the load presented by the resistance seen at the loading coil.

Figure 6:
Loading coil used to match the transmitter output to the
feedpoint impedance.  This coil is wound using 3/8"
copper tubing and uses a variometer inside the coil
to provide a low-loss means of adjusting the inductance.

For modulation the PIC produces a semi-sine waveform that looks very similar to one "cycle" on the double-frequency output of a full-wave diode rectifier and when this waveform amplitude is taken to "zero" another output of the PIC causes a phase switch to occur.  It is in this way that the BPSK modulation is broken into two parts - the phase change and the modulation envelope - and we are able to use a highly efficient, non-linear amplifier for the output.

After constructing this circuit I later learned that a similar scheme was applied to amateur satellites (starting with OSCAR 7) that included linear transponders.  In order conserve precious power, the linear transponders were constructed using the "HELAPS" (High Efficiency Linear Amplifier using Parametric Synthesis) system where the amplitude and phase components of multiple signals in the satellite's linear passband were converted into their phase and amplitude components, allowing both energy-saving class-C RF amplifiers and DC-DC switching converters to be used, the end result being a faithful, amplified reproduction of the input signal with a lower power budget that would have otherwise been required. This system was proposed by Dr. Karl Meinzer, DJ4ZC, and you can read about it on the AMSAT.DL web site here - link.

Note:

This is an extremely simple example of "Polar Modulation" in the sense that the angle of the RF waveform is modulated separately from the amplitude (e.g. length of the vector.)  Since this is BPSK, the only choices for angle are "0" and "180" degrees but the amplitude must still be applied in a manner that forms a sine wave when demodulated.

Where is it now?

This beacon was mounted in its enclosure on the roof of my house in 1999 and a rather large loading coil (see Figure 6) was constructed to match its output impedance to the top-hatted 3 meter vertical antenna  - and it is there to this day.  While not regularly used, it still works, provided that the tuning of the loading coil variometer is checked before operation and wasps are chased out of it (they do not go in when it is operating!)  Since the beacon was constructed, more broadcast stations have taken to the air in the "new" AM segment, but its operating frequency - nominally 1704.965 kHz - is just a few 10s of Hertz below the top edge of the band, as far away from QRM as is possible.

In the past the BPSK31 signal from this beacon has been copied during the daylight hours at a distance of 75 air miles (approx. 120km) and it had been copied in various places in the western U.S. at night.  This beacon has since been modified to be externally on-off keyed so that "QRSS" (low-speed Morse with multi-second "dit" lengths) could be sent in addition to PSK31 allowing even greater distances to be spanned under more diverse conditions.
 
I haven't done much with the code for this transmitter other than add a few features when it was ported to the (then) newer PIC16F84.  Needless to say, there are more modern devices available that contain hardware that would have simplified the design such as that to generate a much higher frequency and higher resolution PWM signal and perhaps, one day, I'll investigate their use.

For more information on this and related projects - including schematics, various applications, more pictures and some source code, visit the "CT Medfer Beacon" web page - link and related pages linked from there.

[End]

This page stolen from "ka7oei.blogspot.com".