Skimmer @ SE0X
The SE0X Skimmer server is currently off line!
The primary purpose of the skimmer is to feed SE0X with spots during contests, but it is also used as propagation prediction tool and to measure performance of different antennas at SE0X. The Skimmer receiver site is located several kilometer from the station in a rural and elevated area South East of Stockholm.
The Clifton Labs active antenna at the SE0X Skimmer site.
The heart of the skimmer server at SE0X consists of a QuickSilver QS1R SDR receiver. The antenna is a Clifton Laboratories Z1501 active whip and the received signal is boosted 11 dB using a Clifton Labs Z10043S Norton preamplifier.
Using the CW Skimmer software together with the QS1R receiver gives us the ability to ‘skim’ up to seven separate HF bands simultaneously. Each skimmed band segment can be up to 192 kHz wide. Spots from the skimmer are posted to the Reverse Beacon Network using the RBN spot aggregator, you can follow SE0X spots on the links below.
The SE0X Skimmer always skim the six contest bands. As a bonus Six meter is also being monitored for openings during the Es season. During winter a WARC HF band is monitored in addition to the contest bands.
A new and very interesting use of the SE0X Skimmer is to create realtime propagation views using ZL2HAM’s ViewProp. This clever software let you plot skimmer spots on DX Atlas to create real time propagation path maps.