What's to do when it's blowing a 100km/h gale?
Well, a bit of lockdown exercise, coupled with a bit of 24MHz radio.
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| Not a pleasant day at the coast! |
The 12m band was not really open to great DX distances for TX whilst I was at the coast, but I did get a good signal across to India, and had fantastic receptions from Indonesia and Australia. Unfortunately, I couldn't hang around very long to wait for the band to open more.
Still, pretty amazing for an Ampro stick and 10W again!
Overnight WSPR receive-only campaign continues with the following results:
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| 14MHz reception of VK3QN, 2020 October 29-30. |
The signal from LY3LT was caught dropping dramatically as the first, very sharp disturbance occurred around 16UT (this could also simply be the transition to night conditions), then being lost from ~19:30UT until it reappears between ~23:30 and 02:30UT. I think the signal would have ordinarily disappeared from around 16-17UT under quiet conditions, and the weak 'ripples' in the reappeared signals are in response to the magnetic field:
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| 14MHz received signal from LY3LT 2020 October 29-30 |
Meanwhile, the disturbance produced sensitive and strong enhancements of the signal from F1JSC, which are definitely in response to the magnetic field:
DK7KA also showed a response to the field disturbances around the midnight period:
Interesting to see new guidance from the UK Civil Aviation Authority, released only this afternoon, about the potential effects of space weather.
Quite an interesting read, with plenty about radio communications, of course.
No doubt about it. The Sun is waking up. Just look at those well developed spots!
Higher HF nice and busy. Amazingly narrow Es path to the US (plus a path to ZS) at 28MHz from my location when using a dipole-like pattern from my 14MHz vertical delta loop at its first harmonic. The width of the path is only ~265km as it crosses Newfoundland (ignoring the single Florida spot):
Slightly disturbed conditions (KP~3) to the west of the UK (shown by magnetometry from eastern Greenland, Z component), gave rise to a very long period 14MHz reception of VK3QN overnight:
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| VK3QN 14MHz WSPR received at MW1CFN, 2020 October 27-28 |
A significant difference, notably in the timing of the peak long path signal, compared to the previous day:
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| VK3QN 14MHz WSPR received at MW1CFN, 2020 October 26-27 |
The plot of received distances shows how the band was otherwise dead to all except the VK3QN signal, during the depths of night on 27-28 October:
Continuing IT upgrades here at Copper Mountain HQ, I was amazed by two parcels that arrived together this morning.
One contained what turned out to be a huge 31-type split ferrite, which I ordered from Hamgoodies. This was something I wanted to stick on the end of the heavy duty earth safety cable that is bonded to an RF earth stake outside the shack, and goes all the way back to the domestic AC input to the house. This was prompted by a letter in a recent Practical Wireless, and this potential for noise hadn't (but should have) occurred to me before then.
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| A tiny 500GB SSD drive next to a huge type-31 ferrite! |
Because our earth system is a Protective Multiple Earth (PME) type, then this safety earth connection can pick up mains noise, although I certainly haven't seen any sign of this causing problems with my endless overnight WSPR monitoring.
Needless to say, you should think about, understand and implement your RF and AC earth systems very well before sticking copper rods in the ground. If you get it wrong, or do yourself something that you should by law get a professional to do, then if your house catches fire, your insurance may well not pay out. This is very serious, and has been wrongly explained in both RadCom and Practical Wireless recently! The following image depicts PME, and none of this article is advice or guidance:
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| PME mains connections. Each RF ground rod you install must have a separate heavy duty AC earth back to the chocolate block (or equivalent connection) depicted above. Seek professional guidance! |
The other package was the complete opposite: it felt like an empty Amazon cardboard packet, but was supposed to contain a 500GB SDD drive. Remarkably, there really was a drive in there! I guess the age of the magnetic disk drive is largely over now, even though you could hardly say they were unreliable.
Another fairly disturbed geomagnetic day brought enhancements for the 14MHz band, as evidenced by the 5W WSPR signal from VK3QN overnight (this large array is beaming long path Europe.)
Signals from VK3QN came in until 23:40UT, and then vanished until 01:30UT, where a very broad peak developed over the coming hours. This is in marked contrast to the quiet conditions curve, which is very much sharper and later.
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| VK3QN's very broad, early reception at MW1CFN 2020 October 26-27 |
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| For comparison, three days' worth of VK3QN reception from two weeks ago, showing that the peak signal on 27/10/2020 was reached when it would, under quiet conditions, be only just beginning to appear. |
As the screengrab from DXAtlas shows, 01:30UT is not a time when we would expect any signal by long path:
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| Situation as VK3QN appeared at 01:30UT (DXAtlas, with permission.) |
Here's the indicative SNR forecast for a 130 degree-beaming VK3 antenna at 01UT (via Proppy), which doesn't take real-time geomagnetic conditions (or a 12-element array!) into account:
Another anomaly was the onset of receiving PT2HFC at 8729km from just before 01UT (I checked he was transmitting before this, which he was) when Brazil would, under quiet conditions, be entirely absent from my receptions from very late evening onwards:
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| Anomalous reception of PT2HFC at 14MHz |
Meanwhile, TF3HZ, who would also not normally appear overnight, showed an interesting variation in signal, notably around 01UT, coincident with a fairly sudden restoration of the field - something that is found frequently in these analyses. Long horizontal lines are periods of non-reception:
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| Reception of TF3HZ at 14MHz. |
Well, say what you like about solar minimum: 12m has been really very good over the past weekend, with openings to most of the world at various times. Sunday (25/10/20) was especially good, but the full realisation of the openings was hindered at the end of the day because most people on the west coast US were not active, despite strong signals gettting across from here.
A sharp disturbance to Kp=6 (G2 levels) occurred inthe early evening yesterday (25/10/2020).
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| Short, sharp shock in the field. |
At 14MHz, the effects were manifest as the Z component went northwards as an initial moderate enhancement of my outgoing WSPR signals to the east. As the Z component went southerly, the signals underwent a rapid collapse, vanishing altogether for most receivers in the period. For some, my signal went quiet for 2 hours, others for 4 hours. The last stage was the reappearance of my signals as the field relaxed to quieter conditions.
When I got up in the middle of the night, the 20m band was open to several stations to the NE when, under quiet conditions, the band would now be dead. Only one anomalous spot was heard, at 00:30UT (-21dB) and 00:44UT (-23dB), from TA4AEI at 3265km, coincinding with the now relaxed field just starting to show another, but much smaller, broader southerly deviation.
I analysed a number of receivers, and found the clearest example of the night's progression to be the spots of my signal provided by SM7KHA. Longer horizontal lines indicate periods of non-reception; these stepped plots are often the best, but not perfect, way to show the data:
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| SM7KHA receiving my 1W WSPR, 2020 October 25-26 |
More dramatic, though, were the spots received by OE9HLH (note: scale extends later than for SM7KHA):
Forgot to publish that I was very happy to be the only station outside the US being heard in Hawaii (1W 14MHz WSPR, vertical delta loop) on the evening of 23/10/2010:
Well, a windy and very wet start to our two-week 'circuit break' lockdown in Wales! But, there was quite a strong Es opening to the US (and Mexico) this afternoon, following a period of quite strong geomagentic activity overnight. Signals for those with beams well within SSB QSO range, although I didn't try that mode. Quite a few people were making it across the pond with white sticks and dipoles.
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| Beaming the US, through poor weather. |
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| Lots of activity on 12m today. |
If you're in the market for a nw laptop these days, you may be in for a nasty surprise.
The story began for me when my daughter was sent home from school as a contact of a positive Covid-19 case. She's fine days later, but with the prospect of repeating school isolation periods to come, we decided to get a laptop to receive Teams lessons at home. Sadly, this software, which schools grab as 'free' platforms from the tech giants, is not supported on the cheap and capable Raspberry Pi computers.
I thought I might find something for about £250 - which I indeed did. Except, when I tried to proceed to buying one, none of the major stores actually had them in stock. All that was available were laptops costing a minimum of £800 - a lot of money for something that very quickly becomes worthless, and is anyway only needed for fairly limited, simple purposes.
Worse than the high cost of the laptops remaining in stock is the universal change to solid-state drives. It seems that for either supply reasons, or a desire to move away from mechanical HDDs, laptop makers now only provide machines with SSDs. Unfortunately, £800 only buys a machine with about 256GB SSD, which is quickly going to be overrun with the endless and bloated Windows 10 updates.
If you look at desktops, like I eventually did, then you can see that the concern over the size of a 256GB drive is justified: many now use a 256GB SSD for the Windows OS alone, whilst general file storage is provided by a mechanical HDD, typically now 1-2TB in size.
But unlike a laptop, a fairly high performance CPU desktop box, with no screen or peripherals, with this much better storage, costs only £600 - or much less if you are happy with what will be for most an inconsequentially, slightly slower CPU.
It seems the lack of laptops is the result of pandemic supply issues, possibly a coordinated change to SSDs (or perhaps a change forced by supply issues in the pandemic), and a very high demand due to people switching en-masse to working at home.
Even if you want a Chromebook - otherwise known as the Google devices that grab all the data you ever put into them - then this will also be tough. The Welsh Government has thousands on order for those without IT resources, but can't get them delivered, forcing them to consider a special flight to get them!
Well, I bought a small desktop box, and look forward to running the new MS Flight Simulator on it shortly - oh, and letting my daughter do some homework, too, of course!
Well, the much-forecast Kp=5 event didn't happen overnight, the actual Kp only briefly reaching 3. Periods of Kp=5 are forecast for the next couple of days, but they will likely be very brief, and probably weaker in reality.
Even so, 14MHz long path WSPR signals from VK3QN suffered considerably, with a vastly suppressed (by at least 20dB) long path peak signal, compared with quiet geomagnetic field conditions a few days ago:
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| VK3QN long path-beaming 14MHz WSPR signal received by MW1CFN 21-22/10/2020 |
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| 3 day combined plot of quiet conditions 14MHz VK3QN reception, 12,13,14/10/2020. |
Well, here we go again! More 'metallic bursts' at 24MHz - with an interesting new twist!
Below is another audio recording of FT8 signals, almost all from Asiatic Russia and Asia this morning (21/10/2020), where numerous bursts and pings are heard.
There's no doubt now that these rapid and usually transient signals are due to a band at the very edge of opening to DX distances, and involving multi-hop, possibly chordal hop Es, or Es-like structures (such as PMSE). A few minutes after this recording was made, my ~50W trnsmissions to the ENE were heard in VK6, confirming the long-distance signals at play.
Indeed, looking at MAARSY mesospheric radar, we can see there are quite significant PMSE (actually, non-summer, or winter echoes) patches drifting around at high latitudes in the past couple of days:
If you jump to 1:12 and start playing, you will hear a very clear and strange 'echo' effect that I've never heard before. The delay is quite long at light speed. The main echo comes in at 0.519 seconds (155,592km, or about 4 circuits around the Earth, if it is that path), and possibly echoed again for up to 3 seconds after the first ping if you listen carefully. It is heard again, more weakly at about 2:01. The delay must be, or is similar to, long-delayed echoes. The more I listen, the more complex and interesting this gets!
I don't know about you, but I've grown very fed-up with Windows 10 and the HP laptop I run it on. Endless feature updates - even though I don't want them - add to the overall bloatedness of Win 10.
Since developing portable and mobile stations with the Raspberry Pi 3B+ and 4B, I've seen just how much better than Windows machines the Pi is. Update at your discretion, pick and choose what you want and don't want.
If you're younger or more fashion-conscious (like my daughter), then a single board computer with wires coming out of it everywhere isn't very appealing. In fairness, these wires are a bit of a nest, and can sometimes become irritating.
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| Pi -top for the 3B+. Almost perfect, but a little expensive, and no camera. |
So, what's needed is a proper Pi laptop. The (expensive) Pi-top has been available for a while, but doesn't seem to have been wildly successful, probably because those who are most likely to use a Pi can make a laptop themselves - or just put up with the wires between salvaged laptop screens and cheap keyboards!
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| 'There you go, son! A nice alternative to a Windows laptop'. How many fathers are like this man, and how many kids are fed up with us all? Image: Arstechnica. |
Thankfully, the folks at EleCrow are just about ready to launch CrowPi2, which looks like a very nice integrated package that will appeal to anyone who wants a clean laptop, without the wires!
The preorder website is a little clunky at the moment, so I will leave it a while. But, if you fancy an affordable special gift for yourself this Christmas, maybe this is the thing to get?
Disclaimer: I have absolutely no relation to CrowPi, and had never even heard of it until today.
At last! Someone has assessed WSPR frequency stability of the IC-705! Still no news on the Lab599 TX-500, but at least this is half the story, even if the 705 is trying to do too many things for my liking:
Interesting to see VK3QN (fixed long path 12-element array) being received at 14MHz in a very different manner and timing to recent quiet field conditions. Blue (13) is received signal on 13th October 2020, and orange (19) is received signal on 19th October 2020:
Oddly, the 19th October signal that comes in well ahead of the long path period is stronger than the long path period itself. This is the first time I've seen this happen, but two-peak morning enhancements are not unusual, although by no means are they seen consistently.
The Kiruna magnetogram shows how little the field was disturbed overnight in order to produce the difference in received signal from VK3QN:
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| VK3QN 14MHz long path (130 degrees) array. Image(C) VK3QN, with permission. |
UPDATE:
With early signs of the field becoming disturbed, but with the Kp only reaching a maximum of ~3, the received 14MHz signal from VK3QN took another change in pattern, with no spots during the overnight period, and an extraordinarily sharp and brief rise during the daily long path period (long horizontal lines are periods of non-reception; dots show actual spots):
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| 14MHz received signal from VK3QN, 2020 October 19-20. |
The long-running debate about what 'metallic bursts' heard during summer on 50MHz could be took an interesting change of direction this morning.
The 24MHz band was right at the very edge of opening, where only one signal, OZ3BAM, was being heard at a fairly consistent level with my 3-ele beam pointed at 090 degrees.
Other signals weakly coming in and out of reception seemed, for the most part, to be backscatter signals from EI and G stations, where they were sometimes decoded, but often not.
This is a brief recording of two FT8 cycles, where the first is a fairly steady level (the background hum is due to a lower-than-ideal input into HRD's recorder), and the second clearly has the bursts:
So the propagation appears to have been weak Es, with the structure lying to the east of me. The propagation also seems to have been almost purely one-way, as I made many CQ calls, with no replies, and also that there were only a couple of reports via PSKreporter - although that doesn't always pick everything up, and can sometimes be delayed by several minutes in what it reports.
A large number of 'metallic bursts' were heard during a few minutes of listening. This is not the case on other days, so the explanation that some angrily insist lies simply in meteor reflections, cannot reasonably be correct. If it were, we would hear these 'pings' every day.
My idea has always been that these bursts are the result of transient propagation permitted by localised, rapidly-changing reflective structures in Es or Es-like patches. I think this morning's experience only adds some credibility to that idea.
The last time I made a QSO on 12m with Australia was on February 1st this year. Since then, nothing.
Sadly, a two-way QSO remains elusive, but I did get a reasonable reception of a VK signal this morning, one of only two signals coming in at the time - the other being 3B8CW.
Amongst the good work going on in the ham radio community, VK7JJ's efforts, in tandem with WSPRDaemon.org, in producing a fast and reliable WSPR database service really stand out from the crowd.
The WSPRnet service has always been reasonably good, and costs nothing to use. But as traffic volumes have increased, WSPRnet has shown occasional long site failures. Slow response times and 'not available' messages are almost daily occurrences.
WSPRDaemon offers us an alternative to the frustrations of WSPRnet's hang-ups. Give it a go!
The geomagnetic field has been extremely quiet over several days now, but things are set to change shortly.
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| Extremely quiet conditions. Image: TGO. |
I've made good use of the quiet prelude to this forthcoming disturbed period. First, here is my baseline received 14MHz spots distance plot for October 12, showing how the 20m band dies in the overnight period:
Next, I've looked at my 14MHz reception of VK3QN and VK3MO. Despite the near-total uniformity of the geomagnetic conditions over the days in question, there are still quite significant differences in the detail of how these two related stations (they are husband and wife callsigns!) are received:
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| Received SNR(14MHz), on 12, 13 and 14 October 2020. |
We'll see what interesting things happen during the coming days!
