17m Surprise! (Updated)

A nice, warm summer's evening last night.  Another visit to the copper mine with my grab-and-go portable kit, this time for 17m, was justified, especially as the 'mini-bog' site had been soaked overnight with heavy rain.

All it takes to be effective.  You won't geneally see these advertised, of course, because nobody can make money out of them (but a few try!)

 

I had a few nice QSOs with FT8 and SSB on 3W and 5W, respectively.

Quite amazing to see how effective QRP can be from a good site: reports of FT8 activity, mostly RX of my 3W:

I also ran just two rounds of WSPR (at 1W), which returned a surprising number of spots, given that 17m often has very few WSPR users these days.  Conditions seem to have enticed people out of their slumber:

So, if you continuously read material online or in magazines that you need a £1500 rig, a tower, Yagi and a £2000 amplifier to be a success in amateur radio - you really don't!  A QRP rig and some junk wire, carefully made into a resonant vertical and deployed on a good site, is all it takes.

UPDATE.

The following evening, I undertook some evaluation of the 'mini-bog' site compared to my 17m vertical delta loop, just a few hundred metres away.  First, the map of TX from the mini-bog:

Spots of my 1W WSPR at 18MHz from the copper mountain hill 'mini-bog'.

And, second, the spots from the vertical delta at home:

Now, whilst the two maps do not look very different, there are in fact very important differences.  First of all, just by looking, you can see that the vertical loop is not getting as far west into the US as the 'mini-bog' site.  It also has more spots from Europe, which it to be expected due to screening by higher ground immediately to the east of the copper mine site.

Good stations like K5XL and KFS simply couldn't hear the delta, whilst the 'mini-bog' site was managing it quite comfortably (median at KFS for 1/4 wave vertical was -18dB)  That implies a difference of at least 16dB between the two sites, given the detection limit is -34dB.  As we'll see in a moment, this kind of enhancement is backed up by spots actually heard, not simply not heard.

VE6JY heard the copper mine site at -8dB.  But from the delta at home, it was only -23dB; a 15dB difference.  Always good to put that into context, because it magically turns 1W into nearly 32W.  Very useful, when you are QRP!

The only close match was from KA7OEI-1, which only returned a 3dB enhancement for the copper mine site, compared to the delta back home.

Overall, of nine of the best DX heard, no less than five did not hear my delta at all in the brief test period (17:54-18:18UT)

And, finally, some SSB heard from far-away Arizona at what is, for the conditions and general achievement of most stations at the time, quite amazing signal strength, albeit with occasional, strong QSB (suggestive of very low angles, I would expect):

Brendan Prize: could it all become a mess?

Almost by chance this morning, I came across a forum post on the QRZ.com page, which is a part of the internet I generally avoid for its suffusion by angry, opinionated white men with a very large axe to grind.

The claim made was that the Brendan Prize was available for a QSO between "Europe and the U.S.", a claim that is clearly incorrect.  

The prize rules are, from the IRTS web site itself that the Brendan award is:

'to each of the operators of the two amateur radio stations which first establish two-way communication in the relevant category between the continents of Europe and America (North or South) within the Two Metre Amateur Band [a],'

and 

 
'The two stations involved must be located on land or non-tidal waterways within the continental shelves of Europe and America as defined [b].  Note that the limit of the continental shelf of Europe is deemed to lie along the line of maximum depth between the European land mass and Iceland, while that of North America is defined to lie along the line of maximum depth between Canada and Greenland.'

Note [b]refers to the Times Atlas as the reference for where the continental shelves lie.

This all seems perfectly clear enough.  But this week, John, EI7GL, reports and provides excellent recordings by others of strong Greenland radio signal reception in Ireland.  Over coming days, a fairly persistent pattern of weather will provide for potentially good tropo conditions between Ireland, the UK and Norway to the north Atlantic regions of Iceland and Greenland.  There is at least some chance of a prize-winning QSO.

This all set me thinking about the precise meaning of words for the Brendan rules, and why those words might have come into being.

Let's take it one step at a time, starting with the Iceland-Europe bit.  The boundary is to:

"lie along the line of maximum depth between the European land mass and Iceland"

Here's a map to help us figure-out where this "maximum depth" point might be: 

Hmm.  We see that there is a problem of sorts.  The "on land/non-tidal waterways" bit of the Eurasian plate is all that bit in orange on the right.  The "maximum depth" between the Eurasian continental shelf and Iceland is, erm, well, we can say a bit to the right of the mid-Atlantic ridge and to the SE of Iceland, roughly between Iceland and Scotland.  And/or we can say that much deeper bit between Norway and Icleand.

But geology comes to highlight the arbitrainess of this Brendan rule.  Scotland goes under water to the north, doesn't go very deep, then rises again as the Faroe islands.  You can fairly say, in both geological and bathymetric terms, that there is a barely-submerged continuum - and not by any stretch of the imagination the "maximum depth" - extending from the North Sea part of the Eurasian Plate, projecting towards and including Iceland - or at least the eastern half of Iceland, which is part of the Eurasian side of the mid-Atlantic ridge - a geologically divided country.

Part of the division between continents near Reykjavik.  Eurasian plate on the left, NA plate on the right.  (C) MW1CFN.

 

In other words, there is no actual division, in anything other than political or surface-map terms, between Iceland and Europe.  In ever other way, they are one.

We can of course take things as written, and identify the actual, deepest part between Europe and Iceland, ignoring the fact that eastern Iceland sits on the Eurasian plate. It's a bit difficult to get an absolute answer, but 'eyeballing it' clearly shows that it's either the Aegir ridge part between Norway and Iceland, or the deepest parts of the mid-Atlantic ridge somewhere south of Iceland and between Europe.

Would it be fair to say this results in this kind of boundary?  If not this kind of line, then it would have to be the deepest part between Eurasia and NA, which isn't the definition used.  I'm being extremely generous in my definition of 'Iceland' here:

 

Turning to the second part, relating to the gap between NA and Greenland, then this must lead to this kind of line:

Now, if you put all this together, still ignoring crucial geological and bathymetric facts, you end up with what we could be forgiven for thinking was the aim: to cut Greenland and Iceland out of the picture altogether, leaving an artificial construct that is based on a Ireland/UK => eastern Canada/US perception of how the Brendan Prize would be won.  The white lines are what we can reasonably infer from the definitions given, and the orange line is what we can approximately assume must connect them.  

I have no idea where that leaves Iceland and Greenland in terms of which continents they are perceived by the IRTS to be on, if any.  In practice, Greenland is either on the NA plate, or its own, rather disputed 'Greenland' plate, whilst Iceland is split down (roughly) the middle between the NA and Eurasian plates.

 

I have no idea in fact as to why the limits were defined as they were, other than to assume, which seems reasonable given the title of the prize, that it was to create a transatlantic region that didn't include Iceland and Greenland, but did include Ireland, the UK (and the rest of Eurasia), and North America.  

There is no mention of where a southern boundary might lie between Eurasia and, for example, Latin America ("North or South" America qualify for the prize), which can only add to the suspicion that the rules were drawn up with the expectation that the qualifying QSO would occur between Ireland/UK/northern Europe and eastern Canada/US.

In the end, perhaps the Brendan Prize has, in light of recent amazing 2m DX QSOs, fallen into complete irrelevance.  Rare tropo allowed me to make three 2m QSOs with 'just' a 3 ele and 50W with Cape Verde in 2020 - a distance of  4467km, or ~52% further than the minimum Ireland-Newfoundland, transatlantic distance.  So, if there is any purpose left in pursuing the Brendan Prize, that purpose is certainly not based on distance any longer.  It is now, and perhaps always was, just the notion of crossing an arbitrary ocean, with some harking back to the Marconi days, that provides the attraction.

Maybe you'd like to contribute your own take on any problems with these definitions - or that you see none at all?  The more the merrier.  For sure, the whole thing leaves me with a headache!

 

 

 

 

Horizontal on the mountain

After an interesting outing onto the local copper mine recently, I decided to try something a bit more horizontally-polarised for once.

I say 'a bit', because putting up a flat-top dipole is so difficult as to render it entirely impractical for /P deployment.  So, instead, I used a shallow-sloping dipole, cut for the lower end of 14MHz (resonant at just under 14.0MHz in practice).

Nice and warm on the hill.

 

Even putting up a sloping dipole is, though, a lot more hassle than a 1/4 wave vertical, bordering on the impractical.  The string necessary to open-out the dipole arms mean that the extent of the set-up spans something like 15m on each side of the support.  Not so good if in a place where there are a lot of people moving about (EURAO provides 9 million Euro public liability insurance for just 10 Euro annual membership - you would be silly not to take advantage of this important provision).

The support itself, a ~9m fibreglass pole, is very wind-prone, and needs a strong base support; in my case, I had to take a 'L' section steel and hammer it into one of the few places on a rocky hill that this can be done.

And then there is the local population of snakes to take into account when dancing around the dense heather!  

After all that trouble, I ran the dipole facing NW/SE, and then N/S on WSPR, comparing to my vertical delta loop, just ~500m away, but lower down the hill.

Results were good.  Out of 11 stations I used for the comparison on receive, no less than 6 (within the dipole beaming direction) were not heard at all by my delta.  It can be implied, from the strength seen at the dipole that did hear those stations, that the difference in signal for some was as high as 20dB; e.g. K5XL was -14dB in the dipole, so not being heard at the loop implies a 20dB difference with a S/N detection limit of ~34dB.  

Of the remaining ones heard, the median enhancement seen by the dipole was +5dB.  

On transmit, six stations in the beaming direction of the dipole produced a median +8.25dB enhancement, relative to the vertical loop.

In the case of both RX and TX, the best enhancements, all in the narrow range of  +10.5 to +13dB, were seen at the longer DX range (typically west coast US/Canada).  Curiously, KFS, in the San Francisco region, heard the dipole 2dB weaker than the vertical delta - the only such example seen. 

The 1/4 wave vertical on the hill, which is infinitely easier and quicker to deploy in the field, yielded an enhancement on received signals of about +9dB, relative to the vertical delta at home.  

View out to sea from slightly further up the hill, on the previous day's outing with a vertical.  Unlike the dipole, the vertical can be easily put up, even on hard rocky ground like this.

 

So it's pretty clear that there is not much point bothering with the considerable hassle of the dipole.   Les Moxon's assertion in his HF Antennas for all Locations book, that an antenna on a hill next to the sea "must" use horizontal polarisation to benefit from ground reflections and so yield the best enhancements, is proven incorrect when we consider overall results.  Of course, there may be exceptions in terms of specific paths to specific stations.

2m: still not there!

I'm active, but where is everyone else?

 

Despite being past the solstice now, and despite 'assurances' that people are making an effort to be active on 2m, finding someone who actually is active is still proving as elusive as the transatlantic signal itself!

Here are all the active stations on 2m, for all modes, in the past day.  Hardly encouraging, is it?

What I do occasionally see is people in Newfoundland appearing on the active stations map, only to switch off again after a brief few minutes.  That type of operating really isn't going to turn up the goods.  Nor is thinking that only the tropo map is relevant to the Atlantic crossing.

Acid bath

Spurred-on by a very nice result on the local copper mine a couple of evenings ago, I decided to try what must be another unique experiment last night.

Parys Mountain copper mine.  Lots of precipitation ponds.  My experiment was from the ponds seen at far centre left, near the road.  Coast is seen at top.

 

After the main mine had been exhausted, copper continued to be extracted at the site through a simple replacement chemical reaction, where ponds of mine drainage are created, scrap iron thrown in, and after some time, copper is deposited where the iron once was.  

Just one of a complex of precipitation ponds used at Parys Mountain.  Image (C) Pixaerial/J. Rowlands.

 

The pools were also commonly used to cure rotten cattle's hooves - a treatment that appears to have been successful.  The waters were even written up in a very early British Medical Journal paper, where they were said to cure a large number of human ailments.  In those days, there was no scientific method as such, so there is no real proof.  What they didn't know back then was that, apart from iron and copper, the waters contain dangerously high levels of toxins, such as lead and arsenic!

For those with an interest, the displacement reaction to extract copper is nicely explained, courtesy of ScienceABC:

It's been a wet spring and early summer, so most of the ponds that have always dried out in previous years by now, are still full of water.

I decided to take advantage of the situation and seek a pond that looked to be more than just accumulated rainwater, and instead full of water that had percolated over time through the rock waste heaps.  

Out in the bath-warm acidic waters of Parys Mountain.

I found a fairly dark, acidic pool which probably had a good mineral content, and deployed my antenna in the middle of the warm water, which was at about body temperature. 

By coincidence, the pond was half a wavelength in length and breadth at 14MHz!  It had a reasonably open aspect, but only the top of the antenna, where current is lowest, had any view of the sea.  The lining layer of clay at the bottom was just thick enough to provide some support for the clothes line screw that holds my antenna up, helped with some rocks to steady it against a fairly stiff wind.

Unfortunately, it wasn't a great night for DX.  There was a very strong 'D' layer formation, so just about all signals were ~1000km.  

All the same, choosing the five DX stations that were heard, the outcome was only a 1dB enhancement at the acid pool, compared to my delta at home.  Allowing for 'design' gain difference, this amounts to ~4dB real difference on receive.  Not insignificant, but certainly not the kind of result seen when the antenna was at the same mountain, but with a clear view of the sea horizon.  

On transmit, the result was similar: 3dB weaker at the acid bath to the DX stations.

Another reason that partly explains a poorer result at the acid bath is the lengthening effect of the watery environment; on applying the analyser to the antenna at the end of the run, I found the resonance was down at around 13.9MHz.  Not a huge effect, given WSPR is at 14.0956MHz, but it's certainly not helping.

Could have been good, but wasn't particularly.

Of course, the location with a view to the sea was also where I have detected anomalies at VHF.  So I will have to try another site on the mountain now that is not above the mine drainage channel coincident with these anomalies.  That way, I might be able to extract the effects of mine waters from sea horizon.  Maybe...

 

Upper HF goes on and on...

Quite amazing to see 12m and even 6m open way past 00UT over recent days.  

Terminator correct for reports.

Mini-bog experiment.

Three years ago, I wrote a post about an odd phenomenon that happens just down the hill from my house, where radio signals at commercial VHF are strangely interrupted as one passes over an underground acid mine drainage channel.

This evening, it was sunny and warm, so I decided to take a walk up onto the old copper mine, directly above the underground stream.

The mini-bog site on the copper mine hill.  I didn't know the wet ground existed until today!

Well, the ground here is very mineralised, and it has a better and slightly higher view of the sea than my house, even though it's only about half a kilometre away.  In practice, I will never really be able to figure out which element of the environment makes any difference, if any.  But it's a nice comparison, all the same.

Despite this being an almost universally rocky area, I found an unusual area which was like a mini-peat bog, and consequently quite wet.  As well as providing a rare place to screw my antenna mount into the ground easily, such a site was likely to be excellent ground.

Parys Mountain disused copper mine.  Test tonight from upper centre left, not far from the main road. 

 

I ran WSPR at 14MHz using a 1/4 wave vertical, two elevated radials and my FT818, principally for RX-only.  At home, as usual, I was using a vertical delta loop, typically having 3dB more 'design' gain than the 1/4 wave.

Results were pretty amazing.  The median enhancement of the signal, taking differences in 'design' gain into account, was 9dB.  The maximum enhancement, to the signal from DP0POL lying near Svalbard (an essentially all-sea path), was an astounding +16dB, which is the kind of enhancement I might find when the antenna is actually at the seawater's edge.  

This calls to mind, and surely confirms as correct, the comments about the Fresnel zone for radiation angles <1 degree being "pushed [far] out to sea" that Les Moxon discusses with some excitement in his enduringly-good book, HF Antennas for All Locations.  With some elevation as well, that Fresnel zone for ultra-low angles may well be pushed further out again.

Line of underground drainage channel (yellow).  Blue circle centre was test site location.

Map displayed at Parys Mountain, confirming drainage channel route (top left, crossing B5111 road).

The minimum enhancement was +4.5dB, though that was to a TA station lying to the east, with the hill intervening.  It's not really worth taking a lot of notice of that particular result, other than to note it is still significantly stronger than the delta, which has a clear view to the east.

A total of 5 stations heard on the mini-bog were not heard at all from home.  All but one were good DX stations, being AA6FT, R0AGL, VE2DPF and K7GCB.  M0GUC, heard at a median -27dB on the mini-bog, was also missed by the delta at home.  

Taking AA6FT as an example, heard at a median -19.5dB on the mini-bog, the enhancement must have been around 14dB for it not to be registered at the detection threshhold (about -34dB) at home.  R0AGL's results also suggest an almost identical implied enhancement.

DP0POL's reception of my single 1W test signal, compared to others at around the time, adjusted for power output, can be seen as being very favourable - at least 7dB better than any other UK station, of which there are anyway only two (I was 14dB stronger than the other UK station):

The other good DX station who heard my 1W was ND7M.  Again, hardly any other UK stations making it around that time, with my 1W being, when adjusted for the different power output, a whopping 17dB better than GI3VAF:

-18dB from my 1W to ND7M, compared to just -28dB from 5W from GI3VAF.

This test again shows just how poor a comfortable, at-home station can be, even with a proven, good quality antenna.  The difference is not down to any RFI, because I've already proven that's not the case with a comparison of noise at home and seaside, where there was no difference.

Acid mine water found within Parys Mountain. It's red due to a very high level of dissolved iron, kept in solution by a pH of 1 or less (at above ~pH 5, iron falls out of solution as a red floc).

 

These kinds of amazing enhancements are at or beyond what we would achieve with a world-class tower-and-Yagi system when operated at a typical, non-coastal environment.  The environments that provide them really should receive more study.  I plan to do just that in the future. 

Even more importantly, the majority who have poor domestic radio prospects can easily get out into the outdoors and enjoy extremely effective amateur radio with only very modest equipment and low power; an enhancement of 14dB takes a typical QRP output of 5W to an effective 125W!