15 Meters active today 2-20-2015

[W1AEX]

After calling CQ for a few minutes at around 1640 UTC Randy KK3AM (Florida) returned my call with his nicely modified Valiant on 21.430. Conditions were not spectacular but we had no trouble hearing each other. Randy's signal rolled up and down from around S-5 to S-9 here in Connecticut during our 15 minute chat. After we signed I was called by Ken KA5RHK who was trying out AM on his Yaesu FT-757 for the first time. He was running low power but was easy copy here. I was seeing lots of SSB activity lower in the band so there is some propagation going on.

The attached mp3 file gives an indication of how nice Randy's Valiant sounds. At one point in the recording I switched in the new wideband noise reduction algorithm that showed up in yesterday's release of OpenHPSDR v3.2.24. While it is not exactly high fidelity and it adds an element of echo to the signal it was interesting to see how clearly the audio jumps out when it is engaged. There are a lot of adjustments to the new NR function that may make it more optimal for the 9 kHz bandwidth I was using.

73,

Rob W1AEX