For some time, I have been hearing mysterious signals on 160m with my Beverage antenna pointing towards Japan and I am curious to know if anyone can shed a light on their origin.

In the recording below, I tune slowly across the band.

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The waterfall display of my PERSEUS shows the signals as broken up vertical lines.

Lee, K7TJR mentioned a strange signal on the Top Band reflector and I wrote him.  He confirms that this is the same signals and said he was hearing them from the 305 degree direction.   He believes the signal to be from a radio navigation system called Hyperfix and believes it to come from UA or the Bering Sea.

Ed, AH2L in Guam listened to the recording and he says that he is not hearing these signals.

As I am using these signals as a propagation indicator, since they seem to indicate good conditions towards Japan, I would appreciate any information.

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Inspired by N6TR who has been writing about diversity reception with his new K3 radio, I decided to set up an extra receiver for this purpose.

I set up my second Yaesu FT 1000MP which has a receive loop on the back panel which is activated by pressing the RX button on the antenna selection on the front panel.

This causes the TX antenna to be routed to RX ANT OUT and activates the RX ANT IN socket.

I connected the RX ANT OUT on the main transceiver to the RX ANT IN on the second radio.   By connecting the second radio this way, it is automatically protected during TX of the first radio, it is not muted, but the signal received when both radios are set on the same frequency is around S9 and I do not find that to be a problem.

The RX ANT IN on the main transceiver has a selection of Beverage antennas to choose from.   The audio from both transceivers is routed through my SO2R control box, which makes it possible to have the radios mixed in various ways.  I prefer to have one radio in the left ear and the other in the right ear.

An article about diversity reception may be found at W8JI’s website .

I fully realize that my setup does not meet the criteria for ‘real’  diversity reception, however the effects are very pleasurable and interesting regardless.

There are many possibilities with such Diversity reception.  If both radios are spot on the same frequency with the same received pitch, you can hear the effects of polarization and space diversity.  Signals seem to oscillate between the left and right ear as conditions change.  It is an astounding effect to receive HF signals in Stereo, so to speak.

I like to vary the received pitch of the two radios, this causes an effect not unlike A2H (tone modulated CW) as was used on the MF band around  500 kHz, it is really beautiful.

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