2m Beacon from Northern Colorado

[Glenn Elmore]

Yesterday Greg, N0EMP, took the old 2m beacon I built that had been sitting on the shelf for years after having been on run  in SoCal by N3IZN and put it up at his remote site. That site is  located about 13 miles NW of Fort Collins, Colorado.  

This hardware is very similar to that at the Hawaii Beacon (is it still running?) but much lower ERP.

It is now about 7500' ASL,  with its measured 2W output connected to a 4 element horizontally polarized yagi on a short mast. Probably the pattern is such that the gain of that antenna and resultant ERP at zero degrees results in very little total gain due to tilt angle from the earth immediately in front of it.  

So it is likely that the 5W it is reporting on WSPR is roughly correct for ERP to the east.

Current programming has it alternating between WSPR and CW,  so a 50% duty cycle on WSPR.

I didn't carefully re-measur transmit frequency but I think it is approximately. 

144490522  Hz on WSPR

144489600 Hz on CW

This is in spite of a N6GN/Kiwi combination here in the shack saying it is 20 Hz higher than that.  I haven't figure out this discrepancy yet-  the waterfall display makes it look like it is as above but the report is different.  Maybe something wrong with the Kiwi's internal WSPR extension when used with an LO offset.  

After only a few hours, it does seem to be working with several spots being reported in three states.

It seems very likely that ACS is at play on the longer ones.  As we've seen for years, 2m WSPR makes a great way to watch aircraft on a busy route such as from Denver International Airport.  I suspect that there will almost always be something in the sky useful to create propagation out to the ~1000 km distance we witnessed from California years ago.

If anyone reading knows the current status of the 70cm Hawaii HW and if it is not in service, I suspect Greg might be willing to to put it on the air from the same site.

Glenn n6gn

8 Feb 2026

Fort Collins, Colorado