It was a great morning up on Fort Henry Hill. It's a very quiet RF site now that the dozens of plasma TV's they had installed in the information centre have all broke and been removed. The down side was the temperature which sat at -7C, not including the wind chill factor.
Todays propagation, not spectacular by any means, was: SFI=92, SN=20, A Index=4, and the K Index=1.
I managed to work 17 stations on 20m, including CU3HY in the Azores, and KN6KI in California. There were a number of repeat offenders who seem to find me every time I activate, and I'm very grateful for them.
About 1500 UTC the bands instantly went quiet, the signals just disappeared. There had been a great deal of very deep QSB on 20m, but at least you could hear something. I spun the VFO several times across 20m, 40m, and 17m, and heard nothing, just static. The bands, it seemed, had turned off.
I'm hoping that they turn back on in time for another couple of POTA activations tomorrow. My original plan was to stop activating this year when I reached 100 activations...now I plan to keep going until the weather makes it uncomfortable to activate. So I'll probably get about 10 more.
Stay warm out there!
I noticed the same thing this afternoon. I was doing some CW contest simulation and decided to flip the switch on the radio and the bands were dead. Oh, well it's the propagation gods whom we have no control over.
ReplyDelete73,
Mike
VE9KK
Hi Mike, Thanks for visiting. Propagation has been not been the best for the past few weeks. Hopefully things will improve before the snow really starts to fly and we're all housebound.
Delete73,
Bill VE3FI