Overnight WSPR Report, 2019 January 23-24

A modest sunspot group has appeared on the solar disk over the past day or so, but remains a member of the old cycle.  Kp reached 6 for a while:

Image: SolarHam.com

Image: IRF/Kiruna.

G0CCL, which is spotted from here throughout the night when the disturbance is more modest, was apparently suppressed by the field deviations last night.  Interestingly, a very strong and momentary rebound of the signal from the noise was heard at 19:46UT, just ahead of the first of two sharp southerly deviations in the vertical field component:

An interesting and very anomalous spot came in at 05:58UT, from KK4PP (running a long wire and just 10mW).  Whilst this was well into the morning period here, KK4PP was anomalous in being the only US station heard and, indeed, other than the very close-by G0CCL, the only station heard at that time.  The first US spots do not come in under quiet conditions at the moment until mid- or late morning.  Note also the anomalous spots between 21:44UT and 21:52UT from CX8AT (confirmed as transmitting continuously), which came in during a sharp, north-going rebound in the field, ahead of a larger southerly swing that came about 23:00UT:

The fascinating thing with many of these spots is that they clearly occur due to some smaller or larger areas of ionisation permitting propagation, but that they are stable enough under quite rapidly-changing field conditions to allow a  2 minute-long WSPR signal to remain coherent enough for detection.  The other intriguing question is why singular stations like KK4PP are 'selected' for propagation from the very large population of active WSPR stations in the USA.