The WSPR that wasn't.

After days of exciting build-up, HAARP powered up its Gigawatts of power from 23:40-00:10UT last night.

The preceding excitment of the ionosphere was conducted at the usual, very high ERP, with WSPR transmissions to test the effects following about half an hour later, first on 80m, then on 40m.

The aim of the experiment was to generate FAI, with the WSPR activity said to be "a bonus", secondary activity.

Over the past day or so, I also came to understand one other, rather important aim, might be said to be public relations.  Some of the tweets suggest HAARP could be under threat of funding cuts in this catastrophic Trump era.

At least I made the effort to (in the semi-dark) hammer a fence post for a 40m, wide inverted vee for the occasion!

Being a nice summer evening, I took to the country and installed a 40m dipole, with one half of the peak gain pattern aligned towards Alaska. Back home, I was listening on 80m with a half sloper.

Well, I looked at the screen in a half-zombie state, waiting for HAARP's call of WI2XFX to appear on the waterfall.  Even the bats had stopped hunting flies by this time (obviously, due to the 'radiation effects' of HAARP, as conspiracy theorists would have it!)

Nothing at 80m.

Nothing at 40m.

Looking at WSPRnet at the time, I couldn't see anyone else hearing HAARP, either.  Eventually, an excited experimenter at HAARP tweeted:

Now, this was an NVIS test, no matter how high the ERP.  But perhaps, when daylight was beaming down on the US, it wasn't very surprising that 80m - or even 40m for that matter - produced no spots beyond Alaska's back door.

Maybe the experimenter was, as it seems from his tweet, perfectly content with that result, and had expected the daytime conditions to inhibit longer-range reception.

Well, that was a lot of hype for HAARP, and probably a lot of tired, disappointed WSPRers across the world.  By way of comparison, I was receiving a K station on 7MHz at 3500km at a decent -20dB SNR from just 7dBm, or 70.6dB less power than HAARP, NVIS or not!

The experiment, should you still be interested, repeats tonight (31/7/18) and tomorrow night, supposedly around the same kind of time.  Latest details come through quite regularly in real time from Chris Fallen at his Twitter account.

The best chance of hearing HAARP at all, as the tweets below indicate, is to listen in on the GW+, FAI-inducing sweeps prior to the WSPR transmissions.

TF4M Reference WSPR - quiet geomagnetic conditions.

Here is a reference WSPR spots record for quiet (Kp 1-2) geomagnetic conditions of signals from MW1CFN, heard by TF4M, within the auroral oval.

Vertical lines aid identification of midnight, UT.  Strongest propagation is strongly centred around midday.

Impressive receiving antenna, a recycled ionospheric sounder, at TF4M. (C) TF4M

HAARP WSPR on 80m (and maybe 40m)!

This should be interesting - HAARP transmitting WSPR!  Power levels 'only' around  80kW of the potentially-available 1.2GW!

Running July 30 - August 01, 2018, as WI2XFX. Latest on timing is 23:00 - 24:00UT, July 30, 31 and August 01.  Broadcasts in AM mode, but either USB or AM will work on receive.

Best details direct from the experimenter on Twitter.

Re-working the 'I-Am' end-loaded vertical dipole.

If you've been following this blog for a while, you may recall this post, all about an end-loaded vertical.

More recently, I moved on to a very robust, all-aluminium version.  Whilst this worked well, it is somewhat too heavy and, especially, the 2.5m-long top load catches more wind than is ideal.

My latest idea was to make this antenna more portable-friendly, based once more around the first seven sections of a 10m fibreglass fishing pole, but with physically smaller end loads.  With the seventh section being about 25mm in diameter, the pole is quite stiff, and quite resistant to strong winds.

A quick forum post on QRZ.com brought an unusually constructive response from one fellow operator, who suggested the rather obvious solution of disc-shaped end loads.  I thought I would have a go at this.

My first test end loads were about 30cm in diameter, which were calculated from guidance in the ARRL Antenna Book.  This very nearly worked out, but not quite.  My TS480SAT's internal ATU could only match the antenna down to 14.260MHz, so the loads were slightly too small.

I decided to build loads 40cm in diameter, a nearly doubling of total area, which connect to two vertical wires, each 2.5m long (essentially, a 10m vertical dipole, plus end-loads).  To maintain self-support, I used 1.8mm bare copper wire, which proved to be a good choice.  So that the hat will fit over a fence post that holds my fishing pole, the hat is made as a concentric set of rings. 

Careful soldering is needed to ensure mechanically-robust links.

 

Autumn conditions have now swept in from the Atlantic after two months of very dry, hot weather.  So it wasn't the best day to test the antenna, as winds exceeded 100km/h under very enormous cumulonimbus clouds.
Having hooked everything up with the 300Ohm twin, I found the antenna now matched up easily right down to the lower end of 14MHz.  I could match all bands except 28MHz, but could overcome that simply by detaching the lower end load.  This might seem to make the antenna very unbalanced, but because one end of the dipole is much closer to the ground than the other, it is already unbalanced and removing the hat for 28MHz probably makes the antenna relatively balanced, overall.

I have to admit that the weather was quite dangerously close to generating lightning locally, with plenty of storms already underway across the UK.  Interestingly, and very unusually, propagation was extremely variable on all bands.  One minute they were strong, then all of them would fade together, as though a geomagnetic storm was happening (geomagnetic conditions were fairly quiet).   I suspect this was related to the strongly convective weather, and indeed, the MST radar in Aberystwyth shows very strong returns, probably the result of strong gravity waves, the structure of which is, unusually, actually evident, induced by severe thunderstorms.

Very strong returns from the mesosphere today.

Not a good day for operating!

The top hat proved unperturbed by very strong winds.

I ran a quick WSPR test.  Overall, and although the power output for my field set up was not calibrated, the end loaded dipole was about 2dB weaker on the median than my vertical delta loop across all distances, and about 4dB weaker on DX distances greater than 6000km.

Because the delta loop is effectively a pair of closely-spaced verticals, that difference is pretty much exactly what one would expect, compared to a single vertical dipole.  So the end loads are not having a noticeably negative effect on efficiency.  The radiation pattern seems to be a little higher for the dipole.


I found the antenna could withstand winds of 100km/h and more without guying, but a single guy to windward certainly made things less exciting!  In those conditions, taping or clamping the sections was essential to avoid slipping.  This is now an ideal multiband antenna format, just 6m total height, for portable working.

Later WSPR test over about 1 hour at 14MHz.  MW1CFN/P is the end-loaded vertical.

Very useful website of the day: VK6YSF

Having a science background, I just love analysing WSPR data.

But, up until this afternoon, I found it rather difficult to import data from the WSPRnet site into Open Office or other spreadsheets.

I am therefore really grateful to VK6YSF's excellent instructions on how to import data by a simple 'copy and paste' method which overcomes the column formatting problems I have struggled with for ages.  In fact, the current version of Open Office takes the data even more easily than seems to be the case for Excel.

And if, like me, you are struggling to get the unequal time intervals that arise from WSPR spots plotted according to their proper position, the answer is to select 'XY Scatter Plot' in the chart type, and not 'Line' type.

Sadly for readers, this does mean my analyses of WSPR signals will now increase substantially!

Thanks, Iceland!

Very usefully, a number of WSPR stations have started operating permanently in Iceland over the past few weeks.  Iceland sits right under the typical edge of the auroral oval, allowing some interesting investigations of geomagnetic effects on propagation.

A couple of the stations do not hear so well for some reason.  Luckily, another two - TF4M and TF1A - are working efficiently and to a very similar level, allowing some fine scale changes across locations to be revealed.

Last evening provided a chance to see the effects of a G1 storm.

This was the magnetometer data from Kiruna:

Image courtesy IRF/Kiruna.

 And this is how my 1W at 14MHz was heard in Iceland:

Well, a clearer example of the effects of a deep southerly swing in the Z component could not be wished for!

You will notice that TF1A, who is a little further south than TF4M, suffers a stronger attenuation.  TF4M was probably located within the auroral region, whilst TF1A lies at its inner edge.  Perhaps that explains the difference.

Of course, this strong disruption of HF signals is not universal, and the results above only apply to the UK-Iceland path.  As I've previously reported, many geomagnetic disturbances lead to HF propagation enhancement for other paths, notably to the western half of the USA.

I was lucky enough to enjoy four nights of clear skies with aurora in TF-land in 2011, despite every daytime being completely rain-soaked!  The image below was taken just north of Selfoss (looking SSW, i.e. towards the edge of the auroral oval):

UPDATE.

I ran WSPR again on the following evening (24-25 July 2018), where the field was disturbed in a complex manner over most of the evening and all of the early morning.  Here was the situation at Kiruna:

And the reception of my signal at TF4M now looked like this, which is pretty much the inverse of the previous evening. 

Update (2)

Another run during the following, geomagnetically quiet evening (2018 July 25-26), reveals what's going on with the propagation.  As you can see below, with darkness now becoming deeper in very late July, normal ionospheric 14MHz propagation is shutting down in the later evening, with TF4M returning no spots from me until well into my local dawn period, where the sun, and not the aurora, allows ionospheric propagation to resume.  Yes, I did check TF4M was running all night!  He is currently running 24/7.

Clearly, and as previous academic studies have reported, active geomagnetic conditions give rise to auroral Es, which supports propagation at a higher frequency than would otherwise be the case (in this case, there is no quiet-state, night-time propagation to the station in question). 

In reading the paper, note how far things have come since the 1990s, and how much information the WSPR network potentially provides to us all.  It's a shame there are so few WSPR transceivers in the polar regions, though.  It seems to me that all research stations in the Arctic regions should have WSPR tranceiver capability, which poses little by way of resource implications or technical challenge, thanks to the simple antennas that are required.

The geomagnetic condition:

And, below, the spots issued by TF4M for my signal.  I think you can see the difference between a quiet and active geomagnetic field!  Note also the very large difference in SNR during early daylight, about 500 times weaker following active conditions, as compared to the morning after quiet conditions.

Cabo Verde, ahoy!

6m was absolutely running like a river this evening.  Armed with 'just' a 2 element quad and 30W for this band, I'm not exactly a big gun!

Still, I called alongside D41CV, managing a strong signal to him after a few calls.

At 4438km, D41CV is by far the furthest I've ever managed on 6m - not that I try very hard, or often.

As luck would have it, my daughter had just been doing some work about Cape Verde, so the radio signals got here interest, too!