Beacon Watch Software

Over the Christmas holiday I found that I had friends visiting Capetown South Africa and thought it might be very nice to be able to talk to them over the radio. I spent some time learning to use an ionospheric propagation prediction program that told me that my best hope was to use 17 meter at a specific time. Well, I didn't hear many folks form South Africa on 17 meters, but I had heard about the beacons, and thought that some dedication to monitoring the 17.1 MHz beacon would surely give me a better hint as to the best time of day to operate. However, after some time, I noticed that I could never hear ZS6DN. Well maybe if I knew exactly when it was transmitting I could at least imagine that I could hear it. So, I made a little computer program that runs on the computer to indicate when each station is transmitting. I called this program BW for "Beacon Watch". I also had read a few reviews about some of the other programs that had appeared for this purpose. Most of these have to be up-dated every time there is a change in the beacons. And many require operation under Windows 95 or 3.1, and I know many hams with low budgets who are still using XTs running DOS 3.1. So my offering loads all of the beacon data from tabular ASCII files including the frequencies of transmission. So you can change the data as fit or as indicated from the NCDXF web page. I also wrote this program in Quick Basic, so that it is able to run on even the oldest machines. I have tested it on all machines that I own either running DOS or Windows, and it appears run equally well. Use WWV to set your computer clock before you start the program. So if you are interested in watching the beacons, DOWNLOAD Beacon Watch. This program and its data files are zipped together, so just unzip them in some convenient sub-directory.

I am just finishing a second beacon program that interacts this the Yaesu FT-840 transciever to either chase a beacon though the bands or watch all beacons on a specific band. This program samples the S-meter readings, and after some processing, writes the data to a disk file in a format that can be plotted using standard graphics packages. This program allows you to watch the trends on a specific location or band over a period of hours or days. The program is mostly working, but some additional signal processing is required to help recognize QRM and QRN so that these data can be discounted or eliminated from the graphs. A simple version of this program will be posted here, and a fully expanded version with several extra features will be available for a small price.