The Varberg Radio Station at Grimeton (Swedish: Varbergs radiostation i Grimeton) is a VLF transmission facility at Grimeton close to Varberg, in Halland, Sweden. It has the only working Alexanderson alternator rotating armature radio transmitter in the world and is classified as a World Heritage Site.
If you want to know more about, you can check it at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varberg_Radio_Station
Today, 24th december 2014 the station was activated and I did some listening from my town Boretto, JN54gv.
Weather was pretty bad, just 2°C and thick fog!
Working conditions:
- Umbrella-antenna (still under development)
- Front end tooks from my Audio Antenna
- Sound blaster and Netbook with HDSDR
- My 3 wheels “Rover” to move everything on the field
Signals were very, very good, loud and clear.
In average I could say 25-30dB out of noise, peaking up to 40dB. Almost terrificant! 🙂
Here, you can watch a little and hear the signal during the “warm up”…
And just below you can see a spectrogram, where you can even “read” the CW from SAQ around 17,2kHz!
Here the text I decoded (sorry I’m very poor as cw operator):
VVV DE SSQ SAQ SAQ VVV VVV VVV DE SAQ <AR> CQ CQ DE SAQ SAQ SAQ <BT>
THIS IS STATION RADIO/SAQ IN A TRANSMISION USING THE ALEXANDERSON 200 KV ALTERNATOR ON 17.2 KHZ <BT>
WE CELEBRATE TE FIRST RADIO TELEGRAM SENT VIA GRIMETON RADIO TO 6O CENTRAL ROBKY
POINT NEW YORK USA IN DECEMBER 1’ST 1924 1ST 1924 NOW 90 YEARS AGO. WE ALL WISH YOU VERY
MERRY CHRISTMAS AND A HAPPY YEAR <BT>
SIGNED : THE WORLD HERITAGE AT GRIMETON AND THE ALEXANDER-GRIMETON VETERANRADIOS VAENNER ASSOCIATION <AR>
FOR QSL INFO PLEASE READ OUR WEBSITE WWW.ALEXANDER.N.SE II WWW.ALEXANDER.N.SE <BT> SAQ SAQ SAQ <SK>
I’ve also recorded the whole 0-22kHz band during the Xmas EVE message. If you want to have a look what was passing on the band at that time and listen to message, you can donload the .wav file here