A little WSPR down on 60m.

It's some time since I did any real work on 60m.  The initial WSPR frequency of 5.2872MHZ has become permanently affected by something that looks like a military OTH radar.  60m is, of course, a band shared with the military, so there is no real complaint worth making.

As a result of this, 5.3647MHz has become the WSPR frequency of choice at 60m.

So, I set off on a 3-day long campaign to see what interesting facts about propagation I might discover.

First, I'll start with TF1VHF receiving my 1W from a half sloper.  Clearly, 60m is a band where the greyline is of crucial importance - as anyone who works FT8 there will soon realise!  Very sharp peaks occur daily at roughly 08UT and 18UT at this time of year, during the period between sunset and the end of astronomical twilight.  During the day, the signal occasionally breaks through, but at low levels, in keeping with D-layer attenuation.

VK7JJ's excellent website is very useful for a more general, much lower resolution curve-drawing of the same signal reports, binned across all three days into single, 1 hour segments of one 24 hour period:

TF1VHF hearing MW1CFN 1W 5MHz WSPR

Then we have EA8BFK, where darkness is a good thing, and the signal absent during the middle of the day:

EA8BFK hearing MW1CFN 1W 5MHz WSPR

OE9GHV shows much the same pattern as EA8BFK, but the signal gets through all day.  At around 05UT and 21UT, there are signs of a brief, dramatic collapse in signal most days:

Next, N2HQI, who starts hearing me when darkness is well in place in Wales, but keeps hearing me, as my signal keeps accessing darkness to the west, until the time of sunrise here:

N2HQI hearing MW1CFN 1W 5MHz WSPR

DP0GVN, meanwhile, is restricted to the dark hours:

DP0GVN hearing MW1CFN 1W 5MHz WSPR