Satisfaction In Utility Monitoring?

[n6hgg]

I'm an aviation listener. ACARS data on HF, Airinc on voice on HF. Airinc runs both services and it's very active. It's not uncommon to log airplane data transmissions all over China and other locations in Asia in the early morning hours at my West Coast location. If you decide to go the HF route, you need to locate and isolate by unplugging or turning off every single phone charger wall wart device that makes noise and every LED light in the house that makes noise.

You also need to learn to recognize what is harmful noise on hf. When you figure out what the band sounds like with absolutely no man-made device noises, you'll be able to figure out when they are occurring and where they are coming from using a portable radio. Hopefully neighbors don't have a bunch of noisy stuff but they probably will.

Those two devices, wall warts and LED lights, are the most common and are diabolical to the extreme for HF and the only way to really enjoy shortwave HF is to be able to get rid of all of the noise. You can do it by either unplugging every device one by one or turning everything off and plugging them in one by one to figure out which ones are the offenders. If you have neighbors with really noisy devices, you're going to have to go mobile and get away from the house. Noises like this are so much worse now than they were 30 years ago before all of the digital switchings power supplies and LEDs came on the scene. Noise will be your number one problem issue with HF and if you can get it under control you will be rewarded.

I put a little 44 KB section of a log of an HF ACARS session and it looks rather cryptic, but if you spend a bunch of time with it and learn what it's all about a lot of it is human readable and understandable. It's amazing how error or free it is at 300 baud. You'll see the frequencies on the logs and you'll figure it out if you're curious enough.

 

[n6hgg]

I'm an aviation listener. ACARS data on HF, Airinc on voice on HF. Airinc runs both services and it's very active. It's not uncommon to log airplane data transmissions all over China and other locations in Asia in the early morning hours at my West Coast location. If you decide to go the HF route, you need to locate and isolate by unplugging or turning off every single phone charger wall wart device that makes noise and every LED light in the house that makes noise.

You also need to learn to recognize what is harmful noise on hf. When you figure out what the band sounds like with absolutely no man-made device noises, you'll be able to figure out when they are occurring and where they are coming from using a portable radio. Hopefully neighbors don't have a bunch of noisy stuff but they probably will.

Those two devices, wall warts and LED lights, are the most common and are diabolical to the extreme for HF and the only way to really enjoy shortwave HF is to be able to get rid of all of the noise. You can do it by either unplugging every device one by one or turning everything off and plugging them in one by one to figure out which ones are the offenders. If you have neighbors with really noisy devices, you're going to have to go mobile and get away from the house. Noises like this are so much worse now than they were 30 years ago before all of the digital switchings power supplies and LEDs came on the scene. Noise will be your number one problem issue with HF and if you can get it under control you will be rewarded.

I put a little 44 KB section of a log of an HF ACARS session and it looks rather cryptic, but if you spend a bunch of time with it and learn what it's all about a lot of it is human readable and understandable. It's amazing how error or free it is at 300 baud. You'll see the frequencies on the logs and you'll figure it out if you're curious enough.

The decoding program is PC-HFDL that I paid $35 for a license which was totally worth it, and the receiver is a Tecsun PL-330 the audio of which goes straight from the ear plug Jack to the sound card microphone input on the computer. It can be set up to plot all the positions on Google Earth which I use. The xh data D-808 works great for HF ACARS also. The program also decodes VHF ACARS very well. For that I have a 1984 vintage realistic scanner dialed to 131.55 MHz. The older scanner seems to work better than a bearcat BC125at for some reason to copy the digital stuff.

HF shortwave is not dead at all. It's just used a differently these days and there's a lot of unused Spectrum there nowadays. I've been listening to shortwave since 1955 and it still is fascinating to me as it was then.