Propagation News – 29 November 2015

This week has been geomagnetically quiet with the K-index hovering around zero or one. This is in contrast to the extremely unsettled conditions we have been having on and off over the past few months. Coupled with a solar flux index of around 110 to 120 this has brought reasonably settled conditions on HF and good conditions on MF too.

Medium wave enthusiasts have heard radio station WBBR in New York on 1130 kilohertz with ease during the night, which bodes well for Top Band propagation. The lower HF bands have also been lively with John, HR5/G4IRN in Honduras being worked by Jack, G8DX on 80, 40 and 30 metres. With the increasing periods of darkness, now is the time to make the most of the lower bands.

Next week NOAA predicts the solar flux index will remain in the range 110-115, but with unsettled geomagnetic conditions next weekend—the fifth and the sixth. Meanwhile, Morse enthusiasts can hopefully make the most of the settled conditions during this weekend’s CQ Worldwide contest. There should be plenty of DX to work and the bands are predicted to be reasonable with reliable openings up to 21MHz, and even 28MHz, virtually guaranteed.

VHF and up propagation news

It looks like another difficult week for tropospheric propagation. There are low pressure systems passing to the north of Britain and high pressure displaced well to the south over Iberia and the Mediterranean.

This means that conditions on the VHF/UHF bands will probably be flat much of the time with no significant openings due to weather events. That said, the F5LEN forecast pages suggest a minor tropospheric enhancement late Tuesday, early Wednesday.

For meteor scatter enthusiasts, there’s just two weeks to go to the major Geminids shower on 13 December, so sharpen up your operating skills with early morning random QSOs until then. For EME operators, path losses are beginning to rise again and windows shortening as the Moon heads out towards apogee from today and declination goes negative again. In all then, this is probably a good week to try some VHF satellite operation to keep the QSO count up. Pete, 2E0SQL tells us that AO85, SO50, NO84, AO73-Funcube, FO29, XW-2F and AO7 are all in good health.

Category: GB2RS Propagation News