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!
