Rough!

On the night of 04/05 November, I really, really couldn't sleep.  The kind of night where minutes turn into hours.  Of course, the following morning, I had to be up early and drive 200km (and back!) to take the practical component of my aviation radiotelephony examination!

Lots of coffee and even more chocolate biscuits ensured I passed my RT exam.  But over on the amateur bands, things had become very disturbed indeed.

Whilst the geomagnetic field wasn't energised to a very high level (maximum G2, Kp=6), it was disturbed for a very long time - lasting more than 24 hours.

Lots of disturbance!  Image: IRF, Kiruna.

I've noticed in the past that, like last night, during disturbed magnetic conditions, I tend not to sleep very well.  This is not due to auroral light, because often, the activity is not such that aurora occur over Wales.  I've also noticed that the sleepless nights don't seem to happen when I am in Iceland, directly under the auroral oval.   It's fair to say that science has (a) failed to investigate human magnetoreception in any coherent, sustained manner and (b) most scientists dismiss it.  I remain of the view that other mammals and non-mammals do exhibit the sense, and that therefore, humans might also posses it.

Anyway, the effects on HF were quite pronounced.  Far from killing propagation, it again, as I've noted very many times in the past, led to continued spots of my 200mW from the figure of eight magloop currently under test here.

So instead of 14MHz propagation falling off a cliff at around 20:00UT as it consistently has over the past week under quiet conditions, it carried on supporting spots throughout the night, albeit to a limited number of stations, but which did usefully include TF1A.

As the plot below shows very beautifully, TF1A was, for the past week, hearing me in a consistent pattern that centred clearly around the middle of the day.  You can see that, as disturbed conditions commenced late on November 04, TF1A hears me only intermittently in the daytime, but continues to hear me during the evening period, shutting down just before midnight.

But as the disturbed conditions continue into November 05 and 06, you can see how TF1A now does not hear me at all during the day, but then hears me clearly, and for the sustained period of 3 hours, starting just before (23:30UT) midnight.

High resolution detail of the propagation to TF1A is shown below:

Looking at all spots of my signal, I was heard 175 times from 23:18UT to 03:22UT - a period where no spots were seen in the previous, geomagnetically quiet week (typical latest spot ~20UT, earliest ~05UT), as shown below: