There were times that reports were collected by editors of newsletters. PA0BN edited the Dutch VHF bulletin for many years and my observations were sent to him to merge with those of other active amateurs. The newsletters were a joy to read. Nowadays, there are many blogs and fora, resulting in a lot but distributed… Continue reading »
Mostly during the morning hours around sunrise, FT8 beacon transmissions can be heard on the 60 metre band. The purpose of these transmissions is to collect data for a propagation study. This is an ongoing project. An article which was published April 2021 is found here. Examples of graphs are found on page 5. An… Continue reading »
Our radio friends in New Zealand informed me that the article on 60 metre propagation was published in the NZART magazine “Break-In”. Below, a link to the article as I submitted it. 60_metre_EU_ZL_propagation_PA2S Summary (taken from the longer version of the study) The author, radio amateur, became intrigued by ionospheric propagation during the late 70’s… Continue reading »
With the development of the new solar cycle, conditions are changing. This is nothing new of course, but a distinct effect was found, that is really puzzling. Compared to last year, signals from Europe to New Zealand are not much different, but SNR reports of ZL stations are considerably weaker now. Using Proplab Pro, ray… Continue reading »
The past few years, a lot of time was spent into analysing ionospheric propagation on 60 metres. A number of observations were published on this website showing very remarkable effects, of which signal peaks at specific times were most pronounced. These peaks occur during openings from Europe to the Oceanic region. Long path propagation to… Continue reading »
Similar to the recent retraction of the permits in New Zealand, the ACMA decision not to support amateur use of the 60 m band in Australia is a slap in the face. Invalid arguments and even secrecy were brought forward to support the decision. Why is 15 kHz of spectrum with only 15 Watts radiated… Continue reading »
The last few days, conditions on 6 and 4 metres were quite good. Even with my modest station, some nice DX was worked on 6. Back in 1989, I became rather frustrated because I had ‘half a QSO’ in CW with CO2KK. He unfortunately took my call as PA2HJH instead of PA2HJS and I was… Continue reading »
An excellent opening to New Zealand was observed on 11 February 2018. The station was switched on around 0700 UTC and several ZL stations came in with good signals. At some point, I decoded 4 ZL stations at the same moment and the 4 calls shown on JT Alert was an unique and impressive experience…. Continue reading »
It is quite obvious that the internet helps to spread news very fast and thus, a real FT8 explosion took place. On busy moments there is a myriad of stations and it is impressive to watch how good the WSJT-X software decodes the whole bunch every 15 seconds. Hats off for the developers! The FT8… Continue reading »
FT8 has been around for some time now. It was adopted fast by the amateur radio community and it is clear that FT8 overtook JT65 quickly. But is it an improvement? It has to be said that Franke and Taylor (FT) have done a tremendous job with the development of various weak signal modes and… Continue reading »