Re: [IRCA] [NRC-AM] Reviewing SDR DX

[Niel Wolfish <nielwolf@xxxxxxxx>]

I am late to this conversation, but my two cents Canadian worth...   

It is definitely a time-consuming activity to go back and review 'grabs'/'captures'.   In PEI this past November, I tried to follow Bruce Conti's example of getting the top or the bottom of the hour on the Winradio Excalibur G31DDC.   But realizing that I was limited in both room on the hard drive and time in general, I limited myself  mostly to pre-sunset and local sunset times for Trans-Atlantic signals.  Very useful for matching up things like the Iranian signals (as Jim Renfrew has suggsted) or possible parallels of the UK stations like Gold.     Once it was dark, it did not seem that there would be much point in getting 0000 UTC, 0100 UTC, etc. unless conditions suddenly changed.   I know I missed one or two interesting things, but you can't hear everything, right?    I also made a bunch of sunrise recordings, with hopes of hearing some Trans-Pacific stuff.   As there was nothing interesting, those were trashed/deleted almost immediately.
   

Now that I am back home, I still have lots of recordings to go through, which will be a 'rainy day' project.  But at last I managed to finish listening to what ever I had recorded from **2012** before I went back to PEI in 2013.    I have also been trying to keep IDs for future posterity using Audacity to edit the interesting bits of audio.  

Back in Toronto, still wishing to DX in the present, I am trying to get one sunrise or sunset recording a few times a week.  Sunrise is best for me. It certainly helps being help to get a recording of a few minutes around 7:30 or 8:00 am local time when I am otherwise trying to get ready for work.  The playback is often done later in the evening while I might also be watching a hockey game with the sound off.  Or in the case yesterday, watching the NFL playoffs without listening to the announcers.  Although I will generally record a segment of the band that is 1000 kHz or 1250 kHz wide, I can usually skip most of anything below about 790 kHz as there's not much new I expect to hear down there and my locals on 590, 640, 680, 740 and 820 wreak a lot of havoc in that range.  Mostly I have been concentrating on the graveyard frequencies with some success.

Niel Wolfish
Toronto, Ontario



On Saturday, January 11, 2014 8:34:23 PM, Brian Chapel <ve7aul@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
 
After a long SDR hiatus I started to put my Perseus back into action yesterday. This time around I have it in a dedicated Win7 partition that can only access 50 GB. This is a deliberate restriction to force me to be more selective in what I record and how long I keep it for. I realize that I must form a new and more meaningful relationship with my <Delete> key.

Brian Chapel
Victoria, BC

On Sat, Jan 11, 2014 at 5:02 PM, Les Rayburn<les@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>  wrote:

> I'm curious to hear how other DX'ers tackle "data management" when it
> comes to the use of I/Q recordings from SDR receivers. My SDR-IQ allows me
> to record 192 KHz of bandwidth, and using HDSDR software, I've started
> recording TOH periods overnight. I record about four minutes per hour,
> starting at local sunset and continuing through sunrise.
>
> This provides a total of 19 MW channels to be reviewed per hour, Recording
> for 4 minutes over a ten hour period, leaves me with 760 minutes of data to
> be reviewed daily. Some channels are nearly impossible to find new ones on,
> so these can be reviewed quickly, checking only for unusual conditions. But
> it's still a massive amount of data.
>
> Since starting this just a few days ago, I've already deleted days of
> recordings, unchecked, simply because there is no practical way to review
> it all. Perseus owners would have an even bigger issue, due to the much
> wider bandwidth that can be recorded. The entire AM band for instance!
>
> What strategies have other DX'ers found successful for managing the data?
> I've considered recording just the sunrise/sunset periods, or waiting for a
> night with unusual conditions to record TOH ID periods only, or even simply
> recording for a week in mid-winter, then taking my sweet time to review
> them during the summer.
>
>
>
>
> --
> --
> 73,
>
> Les Rayburn, N1LF
> 121 Mayfair Park
> Maylene, AL 35114
> EM63nf
>
> 6M VUCC #1712
> AMSAT #38965
> Grid Bandits #222
> Southeastern VHF Society
> Central States VHF Society Life Member
> Six Club #2484
>
> Active on 6 Meters thru 1296, 10GHz & Light
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