Greetings. This is a simple place holder page, until I get the time to do a better one, for the WA1RAJ/B 10 meter propagation beacon.

The beacon is located on my property in Hollis, New Hampshire, and is currently in operation. However, the beacon may be off air at times when I am operating on the 10 meter band. I do have a little bit of an overload problem with the beacon antenna and the normal station antennas within 50 feet of each other.

This is the second location that the beacon has occupied. The first one was in a shed, build in the back yard. The antenna was mounted on the shed roof, about 10 feet A.G.L. The beacon ran throughout the first Winter of operation in this location, until one fateful day in February, 1999. On this day, a rather strong gust of wind passed through the area, causing a pine tree, located near the shed, to break off at about the 40 foot level. The 35 foot section of the tree that broke off came down, you guessed it, squarely between the doors of the shed. Needless to say, the beacon had to find a new home. At that time, I pried the pieces of beacon transmitter out from the mangled aluminum housing, and brought it back to life on the bench in the basement. I placed the antenna up on the roof of the house in effort to improve local coverage. The beacon still resides on the bench at this time. I'll get around to placing it in a new box, and moving it to a more permanent location as soon as I get some free time. For laughs, here are some before and after 'The Tree' shots of the 'Transmitter Building'.

  This is what the 'Transmitter Building` looked like, until 2 / 1999

  ...and, this is what it looked like after the tree came down.
   I figure the section of tree weighed somewhere in the area of one ton. Green pine can be mighty heavy. It took two trips to the stump dump to dispose of the problem(s) in my pickup truck. One for the tree, after I cut it into 2 foot sections, and another to take the dismantled shed to 'The Burn Pile'. Looking at the bright side, if there can be one, I did get to buy that saws-all that I always wanted, and used it to finish the demolition that the tree started. One more note: The beacon was still transmitting when I took this photo. You can't see what's left of the antenna (it was an R-5), as it was bent up like a pretzel behind the back wall of the shed. This was not one of my better days.

Current Status, and Overview:

Beacon Transmitter: One watt output, xtal controlled, home-brew, 4 transistor.

Beacon Nominal Frequency: 28.244 MHz

Morse Identifier: 8051 variant (Dallas DS5000), home brew micro controller, with home brew control software. I'll post the software on this page, if there is any interest. It's not much to look at, it's written in C, but it does perform the main loop control, interrupt driven timing control, and ASCII -> Morse conversion. It could, perhaps, be useful in another beacon project. Send me an e-mail if you want the code.

Current ID Sequence: "DE WA1RAJ BEACON HOLLIS,NH" Repeats every 20 seconds.

Antenna: Old Radio Shack base station antenna, cut for operation on 10 meters. Antenna is mounted on a 5 foot section of masting, at the peak of the roof of the house. This places the base of the antenna about 25 feet A.G.L., or about 250 feet above sea level.

Like many things in life, the beacon transmitter - specifically the DS5000 based controller - has suffered a catastrophic failure.  Due to the dated nature of the controller itself, I've decided not to repair it at the moment, favoring porting the code to another, somewhat more modern platform.

In the mean time, the beacon is running with my old AEA memory keyer from sometime in the mid-1980's as the dedicated controller. The transmitter in play at the moment is an old Radio Shack HTX-100 10 Meter mobile radio, with the output power level set at one watt and a small fan added to the final amplifier heatsink for cooling.

While this configuration proves quite operational and reliable, it's somewhat lacking in its phase noise output. There's enough noise generated by the synthesizer when the beacon is keyed down to cause a fairly large increase in the local noise floor. This results in the beacon being turned off for fairly lengthy periods of time when I'm trying to operate the normal station on one of the higher HF bands. I make a point to turn the beacon back on when I have the chance, but please bear with any interruptions in beacon service until the old crystal beacon is rebuilt.

73's,

Carl Walker
WA1RAJ
Hollis, New Hampshire