13 Jun 2014

10m Es - all quiet for a few hours

There has been no Es here since 1714z. I shall leave 10m WSPR running as it is quite possible there will be Es later, but the last hour has been very quiet on 10m.

At 1816z just spotted G0LRD who is a semi-local at a strong -13dB S/N. A few minutes later he spotted me at -23dB S/N. This may be conditions or that my antenna could be improved or is (unintentionally) directional.

UPDATE 1906z:  Still no more Es here this evening since 1714z. Intrigued why G0LRD is so much better here than me with him. Don't imagine Dave has a very bad noise issue on 10m at his QTH so it is probably the antenna inefficiency here. I'd like to try a different antenna for 10m but this means antenna work which is very hard currently. The present antenna covers 10, 20 and 40m which is very useful and it does seem to get most of the F2 and Es stations OK. My 2W WSPR has been copied in Australia this year on 10, 20 and 40m.

UPDATE 1926z:    Es still around on 10m. DK6UG (633km) spotting me at -22dB S/N at 1922z which is similar to the report he gave G0LRD. We are both running around 2W.

1 comment:

David (G0LRD) said...

My 10m antenna is a dipole (a little bit inverted-V) in the loft, aligned to fire E-W. This puts it at about 8m high, and apart from the roof tiles is fairly unobstructed. I know it works pretty well.

Although 10m is generally noise-free for me here, I do suffer from a single local spot-frequency interferer just at below the top of the WSPR segment. I wonder if this is upsetting the SNR calculations?