12m SSB!

Despite endless doom and gloom in the amateur radio press about the state of propagation, persistence usually breaks through into the open sunshine of a good DX contact, even on the higher bands.

15m was quite active this morning, with a number of VK stations coming in.  That is itself quite remarkable, seeing as a large swathe of VK-land is on fire.  We wish them well in coming through it all, and encourage their right-wing politicians to accept climate change is real, and affecting VK severely already.

Beautiful Namibia.  Image: Wikicommons/unidentified author.

As lunchtime approached, I saw V51WH appear on the cluster for 12m.  I was so transfixed on FT8 that it took me a few minutes to realise Gunter - whom I last spoke to way back in 2015, also on 12m - was actually at 24.950 - SSB!

On retuning, I could hear Gunter at R4-5, but with deep QSB.  As the minutes ticked by, he came up to about an S8.  I switched from the FT-450 and turned on the IC-746, which is a very beautiful sideband radio with audio that is hard to believe.  After a few calls, I managed a 52 into Namibia.

Although not rare, due to there still being plenty of ex-colonial German activity there, it's always nice to make a contact with Namibia, especially SSB at this dead point of the solar cycle.

Band Police

This afternoon, some steady signal strength CW appeared within the 2500Hz normal operating width for FT8 on the 12m band.

Initially, I was surprised but not irritated by the CW - there's plenty of room for everyone.

Then I noticed the CW was repeating at regular intervals.  Below is the message being sent, which has a peak strength from somewhere on a bearing of about 120-130 degrees from north Wales. It seems someone has a bee in their bonnet, in that this is a 'warning' that the message frequency is the lower border for digimode operation.

Whilst the irritated operator may have some degree of argument that narrow band modes in IARU Region 1 are usually meant to run from 24.915 upwards, he has absolutely no leg to stand on.  In fact, he shoots himself in the foot.

Firstly, his CW transmission is at 24.915.467 - within the section where all narrow band modes are permitted.  The operator, as well as being an irritating fool, seems unable to understand what frequency his transmission is going out on!

Secondly, his own transmissions, which contain no identifying information as to the sender or his location, are entirely unlawful, no matter what band, mode, frequency or licencing authority!


Interestingly, I worked a EB4 station on CW yesterday on 12m - the first time I've heard CW on this band for some time.  Given the bearing, and that this operator has no QRZ.com presence, I'm beginning to wonder if it was that station who is the irritant...

24MHz - Some analysis (updated)

The latest 'HF' section of the RSGB's magazine, RadCom, invited reports this month from those who have recently completed QSOs on the upper HF bands of 24 and 28MHz.

The assumption of the author was that these bands are only open at the moment due to Es propagation.  It's not an altogether incorrect assumption, although the impression I get from regularly operating 24MHz is that the band is doing pretty well for the depths of solar minimum.

I decided to quickly plot the total fraction of each month where I completed a 24MHz QSO, together with the fraction of the month with DX activity on the same band, and it looks like this:

Certainly, the recent past seems to indicate Es is the major player in propagation at the moment.  Meteoric inputs - and thus Es propagation - are greater from roughly the end of October to December, but there is not really the peak in propagation one might expect at 24MHz.

UPDATE:

I spent some hours dragging out all the 24MHz QSOs from my LoTW log today, and the results are very interesting.

Looking at the plot below, you can see that the peak month, or even season for 24MHz activity moves around a lot.  In the past couple of years, the pattern of activity has inverted compared to earlier years (the plot is based on QSOs with the same 3-ele LFA Yagi throughout).  Again, blue is fraction of each month with any activity, and orange the fraction of each month with DX (>2500 miles).

The polynomial trend line tends to show a slight increase in 24MHz activity, perhaps consistent with a slow upward trend in solar activity evident at the moment.  DX activity continues at fairly low levels compared to previous years, and the improvement on these longer paths is much slower to take place, and indeed is either still declining or just reaching a plateau at the moment.