After the poor conditions week before last and start of last week NA DX came back towards the end of the week. Nothing spectacular but some reasonable signal strengths from the East Coast regulars. Morning of Friday 11 October saw the New York stations coming through with above average strength. Video below shows how WINS 1010, WBBR 1130 and WLIB 1190 were sounding in London.
Conditions have been very poor for the last week or so despite some F2 noted on 10m and US repeaters on 10m FM being audible in the late afternoons. Just before the the sun erupted again and disturbed MF conditions started I recorded the X-Band as heard in our rural dx location outside Carcassonne. The video shows how quiet it was with audio from 1640 WTNI Biloxi MS, 1670 WPLA Dry Branch GA, 1630 KCJJ Iowa City IA and 1620 Radio Rebelde Cuba.
Receiver is Perseus SDR with 300m BOG (Beverage on Ground). Conditions went rapidly downwards the following nights with nothing of interest making it through.
A bit of tropo in Carcassonne afternoon of 02 October 2013 . Duct was very narrowly focused to the SE across the Med to Sardinia. Video shows how RAI Radio 2 95.3 MHz from Tempio Pausania/Monte Limbara was sounding (and looking) on the Perseus FM+ with Triax FM5 at 125 degrees.
During yesterday’s tropo lift there were some incredible signal strengths – particularly from Belgian stations. Video below shows how RTBF’s Classic 21 was coming into London like a local.
The tropo was very narrowly defined as can be seen by my log on FMLIST. I did try beaming at 70 degrees but there was no duct to The Netherlands.
http://www.fmlist.org/fm_logmap.php?datum=2013-09-28&omid=2121
Another tropo lift has been under way since yesterday. The video shows the Perseus FM+ in action with my Triax FM7. You can hear stations from France/Belgium/Germany and Luxembourg as well as UK nationals. The poor RDS performance of the FM+ is clear and the spurs on 87.4 and 87.5 are disgraceful. The only saving grace of the FM+ is its ability to record 1.6 MHz of spectrum.