EP6T News 24 January 2015
We know that receiving is our main problem at this time, the noise level on most of the bands is very high. The first 2 days we had very high QRM level of humm and buzz on all bands. We bought a portable radio to search for the QRM and found a neighbours faulty aircondition, this is now eliminated.
But there is still a high noise level on all bands, on the phased array for 30m it goes up to S9 ! Even our receiving antennes have S5 noise, manmade noise probably caused by neon lights and battery chargers all around our QTH, so you can imagine how we are struggling with the weak signals from the USA.
The 4 Square on 40m is useless for receiving in NA and SA direction. For us is it also very frustrating to hear the pile-up in the noise with some strong signals peaking sometimesjust above our noise level.
Our receiving antennas (K9AY, Bev. en loops) are vertical polarised. Today we put up another one for horizontal polarization. Maybe this will do better against the vertical polarised man madenoise, we will see in a few hours. We brought all kinds of netfilters and common mode filters and installed a proper ground but all this can not help us to kill the QRM we are having.
On the low bands we have to pull out all callers and this takes time! On 80 m we have better propagation to NA and SA around our SR and S/N is very good, but than everyone is calling :) We cant work all of you in this short time but we will keep doing our best.
Please remember that this project is a start for all new radio amateurs in Iran, promoting ham radio is our maingoal, so in the future, contacts with EP will be guaranteed.
73's from the EP6T team