2017 Es season - not that bad? Aurora springs to the rescue.

I wrote this over the past few days. It started off being a piece complaining about poor Sporadic E conditions. As the piece developed, it turned out that things were not as bad as they had seemed.

What was bugging me was that on the 70MHz band (4 metre band), I had only had one Es QSO so far in August. Normally I would have had many more, and I can often work up to 8 DXCC in August, whereas of course in 2017 it was just one. I moaned about this in my last posting, and I went off and got the figures out of the logs to prove it.

Of course, it was probably just random variation (and not the weather and definitely not the jet stream). As I was finishing off my blog there was a small opening on 4m. I worked two stations in 4m, both in EA. One was on SSB and the other on FT8. That was followed the next day by a short opening into OH with two stations worked. For a while, the OIRT interference made it look like the "good old days" of Radio Gdansk...

OIRT broadcast stations at GM4FVM on 27 August 2017

So I have decided to re-write my downbeat piece as a review of the good things that have happened recently. And why not?


I can hardly complain about the 2017 Es season as a whole, even if August has been relatively poor. Six trans-Atlantic contacts on six metres on six different days so far this year. These cross Atlantic paths are (we believe) multiple hop Sporadic E. Ron, WB3LHD, went so far as to send a very striking QSL card direct ...

QSL Card received direct from Ron for 6m FT8 QSO on 29 July 2017

We do have sea eagles not far from here, plus kites and buzzards overhead, but that is quite a bird. Even the slightest squeak from any large bird sends Katy out of the garden and into the shack for shelter, so I have kept Ron's card out of her very sharp cat vision.

However, none of those NA QSOs were in August.

I suppose in this respect I am "old school". I really like receiving an unexpected QSL card through the post. After I sent the card back (direct) Ron sent me a screenshot of what the QSO looked like from his end. Unfortunately I did not take a screenshot at my end.

Nor can I complain about working 7K2KF in Algeria recently. I view this as a new continent. Sure, I have worked Madeira and the Canary Islands on 6m, which count as Africa, and had many 2-way spots with CN8LI on WSPR, but I have never before had an actual QSO with a station on the African continental mainland itself.

7K2KF on 6m at GM4FVM on 25 August 2017

I am not sure why this has taken me so long as the CN8LI spots prove that the path is open quite often. 2162km to 7X2KF is not far in 6m terms. It seems that the "FVM equations" are the problem, with Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Algeria and Morocco all within easy range but not very active. The issue here is not about the level of Es, but more about the level of activity. Or so I suspect.

It also depends how the weekends fall in the month. Conditions are always better at the weekend. Of course, this is not true, but it seems to be. There are more stations around, they make more noise when the bands open, and that gets others involved.

I have also had a few QSOs into France - which is a great place for me to find new squares on 6m. France was late to release the 6m band, and then at first only part was opened up. Now it is easy to work French stations but they are still few and far between. Given the size of France, just about everybody starting up is in a new square for me.

However good things have been on 6m, 4m has not been good for weeks. I have to conclude that it is probably just normal statistical variation. Up here at 56 degrees North I am towards the edge of the strong Es. Stations in the Mediterranean get much more, and the further North you go the less we benefit from it. So it might reach us here on 6m, but the ionisation might just be too weak to work at 4m from here. A few days like that and it makes all the difference.
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If Es levels may be down (and reading the above, they probably are not down), auroral activity is definitely down.

I wrote a long piece about auroras to illustrate them, but I still have not posted it.

There were more auroras over the last couple of years, and fewer recently. ("Please, no more figures Jim", they cry). That is probably due to the well established pattern the auroras peak in the two years after a sunspot maximum.

Like meteors, auroras do not go away just because it is not a maximum period for them. The various sites suggested that a coronal hole might have been active for the previous two days, but nothing exciting was predicted for 23 August. Suddenly my 10m WSPR monitor showed a blast of noise which filled the waterfall right across the screen. It must have been fairly wideband but I did not see it on the higher bands...

Wideband noise burst on 10m before the aurora on 23 August 2017

This was followed by me hearing the beacons on 2m in Northern Ireland, plus the 4m beacons on  Syke and in Northern Ireland. Interestingly the 4m NI beacon is now running PI-RX mode and I could compare the signal direct and via aurora, depending on which way I turned my beam antenna.

GB3CFG beacon near Carrickfergus while beaming directly at it (tropo)

GB3CFG beacon while beaming North (aurora). PI-RX is decoding despite the Doppler distortion

I must say something more soon on this blog about PI-RX beacons. Let us say now that unlike almost every other data mode, PI-RX works during an aurora. Looking at the comparison above, between direct and via aurora, it is amazing that PI-RX can make anything out of it at all.

Beacons were all very well, but what actual stations could I hear. As usual, not many.

I managed to work one station each on 4m and 6m. They were both LA9BM. Leif and I seem to find ourselves in this position quite often - the band is open but there is nobody else to work. Not quite though, he worked a few more, including OH0CO. I had heard OH0CO over the past few days via meteor scatter but he did not hear me, and I did not hear him on aurora. Aland Island would have been a new DXCC on 4m and 6m, but not a new square.

Anyway, I worked LA9BM on 4m and 6m using CW, and not even using my pre-programmed QSOs using the keyer memory. All done old style with a keyer and brain power. I did hear a couple of other stations but their CW was far too fast for me to try to work. Why does anyone use fast CW during an aurora when signals can be distorted and hard to copy?

I like a good aurora. Even if I only got to work one station on two bands, this one was better than nothing.
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73

Jim

GM4FVM