Propagation News – 25 January 2015

| January 23, 2015

Solar conditions were largely settled this week with the A index remaining firmly in single figures. NOAA’s prediction that the solar flux index would be around 130 last week appears to have been fairly spot on, with the SFI at 124 as this report was being prepared.

The prediction this week is for more of the same, although there are signs of a large new sunspot coming around the solar rim. This, sunspot region 2268, may provide some surprises as it appears to be quite large.

Now on to HF propagation. The short path to Japan could reach 28MHz around 8am this week, although the probability of success is only around three to five percent. A better band at that time might be 15 metres, that’s 21MHz. Or you could look for JA on 17 metres, 18MHz, between 1500 and 1800UTC, with a maximum probability of around 60 percent.

Next week, we will take a closer look a propagation predictions for the much-awaited K1N DXpedition to Navassa Island near Haiti, which is due to start shortly.

VHF and up propagation news

Meteorologist Jim, G3YLA reports that we did get a little tropo encouragement from a weak ridge of high pressure last week, but all of that is in the past and the next week is back to very breezy changeable weather, so largely flat VHF/UHF tropo conditions.

There is an occasional opportunity for a weak ridge in the south, in between lows, but these rarely deliver any substantial lift conditions.

There have been Southern Europe to South Africa 50MHz trans-equatorial contacts in the last week so look out for propagation from the extreme Southwest of the UK.

For EME operators, the Moon’s declination continues to increase throughout the coming week, giving longer Moon windows and after last week’s loss minimum, next week we’ll see a daily increase in loss.

Again, there are no significant meteor showers predicted and Sporadic-E openings are still very unlikely. So it looks like a good week to try aircraft scatter on the higher bands and random meteor scatter on 50 through 144MHz.

Category: GB2RS Propagation News