The other day I was Googling for antenna comparisons (HF vertical vs OCFD) and came across a Youtube video by K5ACL where he uses WSPR to compare his two antennas. I thought this made sense and spent the next morning setting up my Icom IC-718 and laptop to run WSPR.
I left the setup to run for several hours on 20m before I enabled transmitting from my side. Below is a screen capture of showing the map of my first transmission and where I was heard. This is running with only 1 watt of power into a G5RV Jr. antenna at a non-optimal height of about 25-ish feet.
Not bad for 1w
Once 20m died down here (and I stopped playing with FT8 for the night) I switched the radio over to 40m and let it run over night, still using the same 1w power and antenna. This morning I woke and checked my results and was quite surprised by what I saw:
Antarctica hearing my lowly setup with just 1w! This is truly some exceptional software and design by K1JT.
I’ll keep running this software and using it as a tool to evaluate my antennas and radios and recording my results. Look for more on this topic in the future.