BEACON CW STARTED AT 21:35 UTC, at 21:40 UTC Engeenering Beacon

How do you receive the beacons ?

Yes, then it may be the lack of dynamic range of the receivers. Listening to the websdr I also saw degradation, but when I looked at my own setup the spectrum / noise floor remained stable.

I saw the noise floor degrade once, but then somebody uplinked a VERY strong carrier.

It looks like the BATC WebSDR has AGC enabled.

That is normally not a good thing for a WebSDR, it is better to have fixed gain.

But in practice it should not be a real problem, except that you cannot make observations about stations being too strong and cause the satellite to go into AGC.

[15:24] <dl5mlo> OK, beacons will go down for approx 2 hours while we do some main

Fitting ferrite beads?

I heard DB2OS saying the same thing when he was making contacts at A71A.

Not sure .. but what I saw this afternoon that A71A had spurs and others not. When A71A TX'd on .663 there were spurs on ca .499 and ca. 825.

So if anyone in Doha reads this, please check before you leave. I know somebody who records the NB, but I don't know if he also records 'out of band' activity. If necessary I'll ask him if he can provide an I/Q-file of the aforementioned observation.

I told DB2OS about the problem at A71A and they immediately went to investigate that. It was clearly visible when they tuned around with constant carrier.

This is likely unrelated to the beacon issue. Remember the A71A clubstation and the Es'hail teleport are two different stations.

On the beacons I occasionally heard interference that resembles RFI from someone standing nearby while using a GSM phone. That is why I suggested the ferrite beads.

Beacon CW restarted at 22:04 ...

HI HI HI QO-100 = DE DL50AMSAT

Hi,

CW beacon seems to have slight phase noise sidebands.
I have also tried to determine its current frequency: 10489.550068. Using free running rubidium clock as reference.

73,

Viljo ES5PC

Quote from ES5PC

Hi,

CW beacon seems to have slight phase noise sidebands.

You are right, the other beacon has that too.

Yesterday I sometimes saw even more pronounced sidebands that sounded like GSM interference.

... beacons wihth this noise seems to come from Bochum?

Good morning Robert.. I think you are right.. I also decoded them here..

After restarting beacons last night around 22:00, there seems to be noise sidebands up to 20 kHz from both beacons. It is most visible on the upper beacon. I see it as a 2 dB increase in the noisefloor - but I'm pretty sure this is already noticed by those monitoring the transponder?

73 Ole OZ2OE