Winter WSPR Wonderland

Yes, winter arrived in good fashion (by our standards) in Wales this past week. Temperatures hovering around freezing all day and night. Not the best time to do portable radio!

A quick lunchtime walk up the hills, as good snow arrives for the first time this winter!

 

Just before the coldest weather arrived, I'd deployed WSPRlites attached to a 30m vertical at my marshy field shack and, just a couple of km away, a 20m vertical at a lakeside. I run these tests, partly out of an interest in winter night-time propagation, and also very much to highlight that the antenna's environment is absolutely critical to performance - something almost universally ignored in antenna discussions and videos.

WSPRlites are very robust units, but periods of freezing weather have, in the past, led to a failure. As the snow started to fall, I was a bit concerned that the 20m unit, which was in a plastic bag in the open, might also go the same way. There was also the prospect of a nearby otter having a chew (they have very powerful jaws!) on the coax. The 30m unit was fine, being inside a brick and concrete shed.

Anyhow, it turns out everything carried on working very well. I generated a long run of several days' worth of data, so that the comparisons with other stations were robust.

I'lll start with the 30m station, seen below, operating as MW6PYS (my daughter's callsign):

Beautiful winter weather, with the highly-unusual condition of low wind speeds!

The overall results in terms of geographic spread of the 200mW put into the vertical at 30m was as follows:

200mW, out to the world at 10MHz.

Already, we can see that the performance is extrmely good, covering the entire planet, at least insofar as there are any stations to hear.  

The comparative performance is most painlessly summarised by WSPR Rocks' beacons list. Sadly, this doesn't sort stations according to power, but only by the number of stations who heard any given beacon. All the same, we can easily sort by eye, and here's the list. Again, my 30m station operated under my daughter's callsign of MW6PYS; MW1CFN is my indoor magnetic loop - ignore that for now:

MW6PYS, my 30m station, is third in the 200mW rankings, of which all are based in the UK. The two ahead of me - G0MBA and G0PKT - are both coastal beacons. So I can be perfectly content that my 30m station is performing extremely well. 

Incredibly, this garage-based loop was 10th, globally, on 20m!

 

I am not sure what kind of stations sending 5 and even 10W are doing to end-up below my 0.2W, but there we are. But it's worth noting, in passing, that my garage-based magloop (MW1CFN) is surrounded by metal yet still ends-up in tenth overall position, anywhere in the world, at any power!

And now for the 20m results. Here, first of all, is the situation of the antenna:

The 20m vertical, operating also as MW6PYS. You can see just how calm it is!

The geographical reach looks like this:

Again, this is good performance, notably given that 20m is not such a spectacular band of late - something which is seen in just how many stations are using up to 5W output. Before I get too negative, let's look at the WSPR Rocks! ranking for the 20m beacons, see how I did in comparison to others:

What?  47th? Not so good!  Until we look carefully and see that, from the UK, I am actually the second best 200mW station. I believe that the best station, M0GUC, is using a Yagi (happy to be corrected).  The lakeside location, which has previously been shown to confer up to 10dB environmental gain over a terrestrial vertical, is thus shown again to be excellent.