Receiving FT8 Transmission Worldwide Using Indoor Antenna and NCL-100+

So basically, few days ago, i have some crazy idea of “how about using this pathetic indoor antenna to receive FT8 at 40m band? How bad can it be?”. Honestly, i don’t expect much from this experiment. At that time, the local QRM level at 7074 kHz was S-8 to S-9 from time to time. Eventhough i was using NCL-100+ at that time, i was expecting to be receiving FT8 traffic from regional ASEAN + VK region. Japan at most. What do you expect from a short indoor antenna, huh?

So i gave it a go.

I was using my FT-450D Yaesu transceiver, NCL-100+, random wire AUX antenna (thrown out the window), and a soundcard interface to connect my FT-450D SPK out to my laptop. I ran the JTDX software, set it on SWL mode, and enable the pskreporting feature. The experiment was conducted between August 13 2020 - 10 UTC (evening) and about 2 UTC the next day (less than 24 hours).

I set the NCL-100+ to gave me about S-0 to S-1 noise reading and i left it running.

After a few hours, i shocked when i checked the pskmap from pskreporter that my receiving station can receive a lot and lots(!) of JA station and some US station from west coast. Hmmm… interesting.. “This looks promising”, i thought. So i left it running for another few hours. At about 15 UTC, i checked pskreporter again, and i saw another USA station received and even HK6G from Colombia at quite good SNR (about -11 dB of SNR). Wow..!! Colombia is practically at my antipodal location and i just receiving it using an indoor antenna!

“Can I receive a lot of EU with this setup? Maybe, but i don’t think so”, i thought. So, i just left it all night long running and i checked in the next morning.

Here the pskmap from the psk reporter:

Not bad at all huh? This 800 hundred stations and 74 countries was received using my indoor antenna in just one random night. Good location or good propagation at that night, maybe? I really don’t know.

Now i’am thinking of building online SDR receiving site from my location. Hmmm.. What do you think??

TNX es GUD DX de YD1SDL, 2020

#StayAtHome #MainRadiodiRumahAja

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