Whilst geomagnetically quiet, mid-winter evenings now bring essentially no propagation after about 21:00UT, last night brought a lot of spots from Sweden and Norway.
The main stations being heard repeatedly were: SM0HPL, LA6GH, OH2BC and OH6MQM, all at very low SNR, typically in the -20 to -28dB range from <=500mW outputs. Other than SM0HPL, none of these operators provide even the remotest hint on QRZ.com or WSPRnet about their antenna systems; there's not much point in having a WSPRnet user page that simply says: 'WSPRlite' under station information!
Interestingly, I was hearing OK1RPL (100mW, also absolutely no information on antenna system) at the amazing SNR of -08dB at 00:20UT, which was repeated at 01:40UT at -09dB.
My blogging colleague, Bas, PE4BAS, wrote an interesting post about good signals from the Scandinavian area on 28MHz yesterday - the same region I was receiving those weak 14MHz spots from all night long last night. Maybe there's a link there?
Looking at the Norwegian line stackplot, there's not a lot, other than perhaps pre-disturbance enhancement (things became wobbly into the morning), to link the 14MHz overnight spots with geomagnetic activity.
Once again, explanation for these things mostly escapes me, but does reinforce my determination to put a HF SDR receiver on my Santa's list this year!
2 comments:
Hello John, I spotted Norway, Sweden and Finland at night on 10m FT8. The problem is that these spots can also be aircraft scatter since I'm directly below a flightpath. 73, Bas
Ah! With FT8, I guess the frequency shift from aircraft scatter makes spots more likely than with the big, undecodable diagonals it produces on WSPR!
Post a Comment