Monday, February 09, 2009

WebSDR PSK250 Station Identified

We have a positive ID on the station mentioned just below. It's the one that transmits long weather bulletins apparently from Hamburg NAVTEX and Deutcher Wetterdienst. I'd been trying to figure that one out for a week.

A Google search for PSK250 (the mode used, a hot-rod 250-baud variant of psk31) plus a few other things turned up the wiki for PSKmail, yet another HF e-mail system. This one is in use worldwide, though I've never heard it here in The Land That Shortwave Forgot.

Be that as it may, the wiki turned up a list of PSKmail servers. A likely candidate seemed to be DK4XI-8, a DK4XI mail node using a center frequency of 3588.0 kHz. The station is listed as German. The frequency would seem right, in view of the various offsets we're dealing with here. It's listed as not beaconing, but note the identifier that was also copied at the end of the elephant picture a couple of posts down.

Sure enough, I subsequently copied a CQ DE DK4XI-8 preamble before a scheduled weather broadcast at 2116 UTC today (February 9, 2009). Isn't that always the way, that you see an identifier right after you spend a whole morning hunting things down? Anyway, it's confirmed.

BTW, the killer signal right above it on 3588.5 is DA5UWG. It's another PSK250 automated PSKmail server.