A visit to Sugar Loaf Hill

One late  night after work i went to a friends a house , he had a clear view of the tower up on the hill, so i asked, "how hard is it to get up that hill?" his replay "not very". so that was it we decided to go a a group trip up the the Sugar loaf hill and see what's up there. I also brought some test equipment and my trusty camera! 

See Dave of Get Electronic, posing in front of the van in his lab coat, being "Dr Dave!"

Once we arrived we setup a makeshift mobile Lab in the back off my van, stuck an antenna on the roof and took some measurements, surprisingly the levels were quite low, i had anticipated huge amounts of emissions from this tower so I put a 30dBm attenuator in front of my 23GHz spectrum analysers input. suffice to say it was not required.

See the spectral plot of "the sound" at 92.9MHz this was with a untuned whip antenna going straight into the going end of my S.A. with each division on the screen being 40Khz. By the looks of things this station is not over modulating like other stations typically do. but this is not why i came up. my intentions were to measure pilot tone levels, RSD encoding and other levels and deviations. what i ended up doing was turning into RNZ concert and waiting of the gaps of silence in between music, at which point i quickly captured the screen before the next scheduled programme.

we also had a look at the cellular band but that didn't tell us much as this S.A cannot demodulate of decode . but it was interesting to look at.