Category Archives: Low VHF

Band I Italian STL

Tuesday 16 June 2015 saw a big Sporadic E opening in the UK. I managed to work SV2RJO on 6m cw which was confirmed on LOTW – super fine business! He’s a distance of 2,154 km from me which is about the furthest I’ve worked on single hop Es. Last night we had some interesting short range Es and I worked F2DX in Sorges France which is a distance of 704 km – two 6m single hop extremes!

I’ve almost achieved my very modest goals for this season which was to get to 60 DXCC on 6m (achieved with Macedonia and Greece) and 225 locator squares (1 to go).

On Tuesday I checked for Italian STLs on Band I and found:

52.60 Radio Radar, Castel di Casio/Casola (bo)
54.37 Simply Radio (tivoli) (rm)
56.50 MEP Radio Organizzazione (P. Net), Rieti/Frazione Campoforogna (Monte Terminillo) (ri)

http://www.fmlist.org/fm_logmap.php?datum=2015-06-16&omid=2121&band=ALL&target=ALL&rxin=ALL

No sign of the two Jonica Radio outlets or AFN on 48.50.

Low VHF in Carcassonne

Some beautiful weather in Carcassonne last week with temperatures up to 28C! The MUF (maximum usable frequency) obliged as well and several NA and SA utility comms were heard between 29.7 and 40.0 MHz.

Here’s 33.6 MHz at 1515 UTC on 30 October 2013:

 

High MUF 39.040 MHz 15:20 UTC 30 October 2013 – sounds Brazilian

 

33.78 MHz at 15:29 UTC 30 October 2013:

 

and 33.74 MHz at 1517 UTC 1 November 2013:

 

SFI was getting up to 160 and above last week and it’s great to see the F2 propagation bring in some interesting DX.

Equipment used was the Icom 9100 in NFM with 12 kHz filter and Cushcraft R8 vertical. Audio fed out of icom into Acer laptop mic input and recorded with the versatile freeware Audacity.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

F2 Low VHF Propagation

As expected autumnal F2 propagation has returned to London with MUFs up to 35 MHz. Below is how the Orlando weather station WQIN663 on 33.42 MHz was sounding yesterday afternoon at 17.20. Rig is the versatile Uniden UBC800XLT controlled by bcTool and antenna is a simple horizontal 35 MHz dipole in an apple tree.

I like bcTool (http://www.bctool.org/) as it logs and records each time the squelch is broken. The audio below is mainly continuous though is a really a montage of six individual recordings as the squelch dropped with signal fades. I used Audacity to combine the wave files from bcTool and then export as mp3.