The club operates beacons on 2m and 23cm to assist both local and distant Amateurs with equipment testing and propagation monitoring.
2 Meters
Location: Isaacs Ridge, ACT
Frequency: 144.410 MHz
Power: 10 watts
Antenna: “Big Wheel” at 6m AGL
Modulation: FSK CW alternating with GE1
Status: Operational
The beacon has two sequential modes
1) FSK CW. Nice waveform shaped (no hard edges) 500Hz shift @ 10 wpm ish . -shift is Fc-250Hz, + is Fc+250Hz, so you want to tune an USB receiver maybe 600Hz low to hear it.
2) GE1-1. This is a subset of a new 10 gig EME mode I am working on, which mitigates the problems of spreading off the moon. This is a simple chirp up, chirp down ASCII representation of VK1RBM. The chirp sweep is -400 to +400 Hz, and has a period of 16384/24000 seconds.
The mode also mitigates decoding problems from aircraft doppler, meteors etc over long paths. The effective noise BW is about 1.5Hz. I will be shortly posting software you can use to decode it.
3) There is a few seconds of steady carrier in there between GE1-1 and the morse for waterfallers
Frequency stability is not important for this beacon, it has a TCXO and is not GPS locked and there is no timing to the minute etc because the mode does not need it. If your radio is tuned off by 50% of the bandwidth (say 400Hz) , you’ll only lose 3dB ish… The sweep width was chosen to fit through SSB radios with loads of room for error, and inside an 800Hz envelope of beacon allocation , approx, since they are all stacked together a couple of kHz apart.
23 Centimeters
Location: Mt Ginini, ACT
Frequency: 1296.410 MHz
Power: 10 watts
Antenna: Slot antenna at 16m AGL
Modulation: FSK CW
Status: Operational
FSK CW. Nice waveform shaped (no hard edges) 500Hz shift @ 10 wpm ish . -shift is Fc-250Hz, + is Fc+250Hz, so you want to tune an USB receiver maybe 600Hz low to hear it.