The WSPR that wasn't.

After days of exciting build-up, HAARP powered up its Gigawatts of power from 23:40-00:10UT last night.

The preceding excitment of the ionosphere was conducted at the usual, very high ERP, with WSPR transmissions to test the effects following about half an hour later, first on 80m, then on 40m.

The aim of the experiment was to generate FAI, with the WSPR activity said to be "a bonus", secondary activity.

Over the past day or so, I also came to understand one other, rather important aim, might be said to be public relations.  Some of the tweets suggest HAARP could be under threat of funding cuts in this catastrophic Trump era.

At least I made the effort to (in the semi-dark) hammer a fence post for a 40m, wide inverted vee for the occasion!

Being a nice summer evening, I took to the country and installed a 40m dipole, with one half of the peak gain pattern aligned towards Alaska. Back home, I was listening on 80m with a half sloper.

Well, I looked at the screen in a half-zombie state, waiting for HAARP's call of WI2XFX to appear on the waterfall.  Even the bats had stopped hunting flies by this time (obviously, due to the 'radiation effects' of HAARP, as conspiracy theorists would have it!)

Nothing at 80m.

Nothing at 40m.

Looking at WSPRnet at the time, I couldn't see anyone else hearing HAARP, either.  Eventually, an excited experimenter at HAARP tweeted:

Now, this was an NVIS test, no matter how high the ERP.  But perhaps, when daylight was beaming down on the US, it wasn't very surprising that 80m - or even 40m for that matter - produced no spots beyond Alaska's back door.

Maybe the experimenter was, as it seems from his tweet, perfectly content with that result, and had expected the daytime conditions to inhibit longer-range reception.

Well, that was a lot of hype for HAARP, and probably a lot of tired, disappointed WSPRers across the world.  By way of comparison, I was receiving a K station on 7MHz at 3500km at a decent -20dB SNR from just 7dBm, or 70.6dB less power than HAARP, NVIS or not!

The experiment, should you still be interested, repeats tonight (31/7/18) and tomorrow night, supposedly around the same kind of time.  Latest details come through quite regularly in real time from Chris Fallen at his Twitter account.

The best chance of hearing HAARP at all, as the tweets below indicate, is to listen in on the GW+, FAI-inducing sweeps prior to the WSPR transmissions.