The beacons are currently off-air. We will post an update when they come back on.
As well as the GB3SA repeater, there are 5 propagation beacons that run 24/7 covering 10m, 6m, 4m, 2m and 70cms.
The intention is that these can be used to spot any local DX opportunities on these bands – always supposing that there are other stations monitoring.
Currently there are only a few stations monitoring 70cm in the whole world, but hopefully that will change as more hams realise that there is something to monitor.
The beacons were all designed and built by Phil Crockford G8IOA. Their development and testing required learning a few techniques on thermal frequency stability, particularly on 70cms. At 430Mhz, you need a frequency stable to better than 4hz if you want transmissions to decode, a stability of .01ppm. Most commercial rigs only quote 0.5ppm….
Click here to see the latest spots over the last hour (thanks to Gwyn Griffiths G3ZIL and Rob Robinett AI6VN for allowing access to the WSPR Daemon and helping code the extract!)
See the coverage of the beacons here: WSPR DX Records