Wednesday 12 May 2021

Ooooh! Aurora!

Thanks to an UK-based aurora text alert, I was made aware of a Kp=5 event mid-morning today.

By tea time, the event had grown to G3 levels.  I could hear echoey FT8 signals when pointing south with my 2-ele beam, so a good indication it should be turned north! 

Significant 50MHz FT8 signal spread due to aurora.

 

Wow!
 

Sure enough, there was MM5DWW busy working an aurora scatter pile-up.  He wasn't very strong, but was certainly stable and perfectly readable, even at a normal speaking speed.

All turn to the north!  12m Yagi and 6m quad eagerly await aurora scatter.  The quad is lower than the Yagi, and only shows a small degree of interaction when up.
 

I put in a number of calls, but no joy for a while amongst others in Scotland who were catching stronger conditions than in Wales.

Just before I had to get the kids, I managed to get through, taking a couple of repeat efforts to get the complete callsign across.  Here's the HRD recording:

Very happy with that QSO - the first aurora SSB contact since January 01, 2016!

A couple of hours later, aurora-Es kicked in, with spectacular signal strengths to the east and northeast:


 

 

 


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