Historical transmission of SAQ on 17,2 kHz

On july 4th 2004 there was another historical transmission of SAQ. This vlf station is located at Grimeton in Sweden.
For more information about this station : http://www.alexander.n.se

My ‘contest’ to receive this station starts at 5:45 local time (3:45 UTC). My wife works in a hospital as a midwife and has the early morning shift. And guess who has to bring her ?
Took our 2 year old daughter with us, dropped off my wife and went home. Gathered all my equipment and drove to my parents. They live about 23 km from our home, in a small village called Heist op den Berg, locator is JO21IB and there is less noise than in my area. It is now 7:30 (5:30 UTC). In my hurry I forgot the fishing rod that I use to attach my wire antenna to. No problem, trees enough at my parents. Set the whole station up and went back inside to wait. Around 10:25 (8:25 UTC) I started to record the incoming sound. Few minutes later there was a tuning sound followed by a good audible CW code. As my ham licence doesn’t require me to know CW, the signal isn’t understandable to me. But this is not my major goal.
I can receive them !

At 12:30 (10:30 UTC) the following recording is made : MP3 audio file. (738 kB)
This file went thru some amplifying, filtering and resampling stages.

SAQ-and-RDLOn the following picture you can see a screen capture of the CW signal (left) and the RTTY signal of RDL (right).

My station equipment :
– McGreevy BBB4 vlf receiver with 3 meter antenna
– IBM Thinkpad portable computer
– Spectrum Lab from DL4YHF

ON3JT-BBB4-receiverHere’s a picture of my station :
On the left is my fishing rod in a small red tube. This red tube has a grounding pin that is connected to my RX. The yellow wire is the 3 meter long antenna. And the RX of course, on the right the laptop.

Until next year ?