Optical receiver at Clive G4FVP’s home 17km away from my Beacon.
The receiver itself is 4x Photodiodes with 4x 10mm lenses plus IR BP filters in between – see this page
The beacon is 24x 3w 850nM IR LED’s modulated with square wave from GPS module or an STM32 modulating Q65. The LED’s are tun at around 1w per LED to try make them last – see this page
The Data Recording is done with a Raspberry Pi4, vlf-tools software, Neo-6m GPS module and WM8731 I2S audio device.
Receiver was installed on 8th March 2026.
This is not a typical waterfall plot, it goes from left to right, vertical is frequency scale.
Temporarily offline for tests 20/3.
| FFT Bin: | 0mHz |
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Weather mid path, see this link
Below is the weather from Teesside Airport METAR data.
SCT, FEW and BKN are the cloud reporting methods.
Useful Links:
Air Quality Forecast: https://aqicn.org/forecast/world
Notes:
Significant rain overnight 12-13th March blocking signal, no sign of rain causing enhancement yet.
Weak trace visible even during daytime is the harmonic form the 1pps of the GPS Receiver on exactly 2010Hz. Freq adjusted to 2010.1065Hz to avoid this.
Beacon off 12/3/26 due to high winds, Switched back on with low antenna mast at 19:40 12/3.
Beacon height lowered by 10ft @21:15 on 11/3/26 due to high winds.
Rx elevated up by ~5deg 21:25 16/3
Beacon offline 4-5th Apr 2026 - high winds.
