New propagation predictions for first quarter 2014

I have now updated my HF propagation prediction charts for the first quarter of 2014 to take into account the latest predicted smoothed sunspot numbers. It is generally thought that we may now be at or past the second hump of this sunspot maximum, but the sun continues to throw some surprises. 

For example, the observed sunspot numbers for the last six months of 2013 were 57.0, 66.0, 36.9, 85.6, 77.6 and 90.3, which shows the great variation. 

The current predicted smoothed sunspot number (which is that recommended for VOACAP-based prediction programs) is about 61-62 for the next three months.

This equates to a 10.7cm solar flux index of about 110 (on 24th January it was 136 with an actual sunspot number of 121).

A flux over 100 suggests that 10m will continue to open on a fairly regular basis and the next few months should throw up some good opportunities for DX on the higher bands. However, the longer-term trend may be downwards.

On the downward side of the cycle we may also experience more unsettled conditions due to flares and coronal mass ejections. These may cause short-term D-layer absorption, poor or noisy conditions (especially on routes over the poles) or depletion of the F layer (with corresponding poor conditions on the upper HF bands). Looking on the bright side it may also give raise to aurorae.

The short-path HF predictions from the UK can be found via a link on the top right or by clicking here. 

If you want to produce more detailed point-to-point calculations (and don't have your own program) I recommend VOACAP online at http://www.voacap.com/prediction.html

You can keep track of the current state of the sun at www.solarham.com

Steve G0KYA

Chairman, RSGB Propagation Studies Committee

Christmas Eve 2013 LF broadcast from SAQ, Grimeton, Sweden

The SAQ 17.2kHz transmitter at Grimeton, Sweden

I remembered to record the Christmas Eve Morse broadcast from the world heritage radio station SAQ at Grimeton, Sweden this year. It was broadcast on 17.2kHz using an Alexanderson alternator and about 100kW.

Last tranmission I forgot to turn my Wellbrook ALA1530S loop to point North East, so it was in the null and I received nothing - doh! I used a Perseus SDR and the loop, which worked well and all was copied.

The SDR broke the recording into two files and knocked off the "C" in "Merry Christmas", but I have put it back in using Audacity sound editing software.

If you don't read CW the message was:

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VVV DE SAQ SAQ SAQ.

100KW ALTERNATOR ON 17.2KHZ.

WE AGAIN WISH YOU ALL A MERRY CHRISTMAS AND A HAPPY NEW YEAR. SIGNED: THE WORLD HERITAGE AT GRIMETON AND THE ALEXANDER-GRIMETON VETERANRADIOS VAENNER ASSOCIATION.

FOR QSL INFO PLEASE READ OUR WEBSITE: WWW.ALEXANDER.N.SE.
DE SAQ SAQ SAQ SK.

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You can listen to the broadcast yourself using the controls below.

First FUNCube-1 telemetry successfully received

The telemetry frame showing the various parameters

Wa-hey! I have now managed to receive and decode my first telemetry frames from the FUNCube-1 satellite. This was on the pass starting at 09:10 on 22/11/13. There'll be another higher angle pass at 10:45 (22/11) over the UK.

I used a loft-mounted Slim Jim antenna for 2m and my Icom IC-7400 transceiver on 145.935MHz USB.

I fed the audio out of the back of the radio through my usual isolation interface, used for PSK and RTTY, into a Dell PC running the FUNCube-1 dashboard.  I only managed a few decent frames as the pass was low angle (about 9 degrees max) and my set up is not exactly optimal in terms of antenna and feeder (I don't do much VHF). But hey, it worked!

 The X- panel temperature rises during the orbit

You can quite clearly see the temperature of the spacecraft rise as it comes out of eclipse, plus the telemetry shows that all systems are working, the PA is putting out 287mW and the solar cells putting out about 4V.

The black panels are hotter than the silver, which makes sense.

If you are interested in collecting data form the satellite (which is then automatcailly uploaded to a data warehouse) all the details can be found at http://funcube.org.uk.

It isn't too difficult, but just follow the instructions carefully.

Steve G0KYA

FUNCube-1 satellite launched successfully

The FUNcube-1 cubesat launched successfully this morning aboard a Dnepr rocket. It has already been heard in the UK and South Africa. Now the job of making sure everything checks out begins before it is fully ready for use by schools and amateurs.

In the meantime, see if you can hear it.

The frequencies are:

Radio Communications Payload
145.935 MHz BPSK Telemetry 30 or 300 mW

Inverting SSB/CW transponder 300 mW PEP
435.150 – 435.130 MHz Uplink
145.950 – 145.970 MHz Downlink

A program like Orbitron will tell you where the satellite is, although I imagine the Kepplerian elements to track it will be updated over the next few days. The raw ones I have are:

FUNCUBE-1
1 99991U 00000    13325.30956308  .00000106  00000-0  10000-3 0 00010
2 99991 097.7956 038.2570 0059925 198.5190 336.5388 14.77841394000015

Take a look at http://amsat-uk.org/ for up to date info.

Update: I just heard FUNcube-1 on the 21/11 19:52 pass, so the Keps look about right. I used USB on 145.935MHz +/- Doppler. It wasn't very strong, but I was only using a Slim Jim in the loft with some lossy RG58 coax. I think a beam is the way to go.

Here are some predicted passes for the next few days - no promises due to the raw element data that needs to be updated!
2013-11-21 19:52:44 FUNCUBE-1             80.4 10.0  ecl  2114 284.1 -35.7
2013-11-21 19:54:53 FUNCUBE-1             52.5 13.2  ecl  1896 284.6 -36.0
2013-11-21 19:57:01 FUNCUBE-1             24.7 10.0  ecl  2103 285.1 -36.3

2013-11-21 21:25:56 FUNCUBE-1            154.3 10.0  ecl  2118 308.3 -48.3
2013-11-21 21:30:33 FUNCUBE-1             71.7 68.9  ecl   722 309.8 -48.9
2013-11-21 21:35:07 FUNCUBE-1            349.9 10.0  ecl  2099 311.2 -49.4

2013-11-21 23:04:11 FUNCUBE-1            226.1 10.0  ecl  2119 344.2 -56.7
2013-11-21 23:07:27 FUNCUBE-1            271.0 18.6  ecl  1609 345.6 -56.8
2013-11-21 23:10:41 FUNCUBE-1            315.7 10.0  ecl  2107 346.9 -57.0

2013-11-22 10:46:06 FUNCUBE-1             19.3 10.0    ?  2036 166.6  16.2
2013-11-22 10:50:30 FUNCUBE-1            101.6 64.2    ?   691 167.7  16.4
2013-11-22 10:54:45 FUNCUBE-1            184.1 10.1    ?  1968 168.7  16.5

2013-11-22 12:23:19 FUNCUBE-1            348.5 10.0    ?  2037 190.4  16.6
2013-11-22 12:26:32 FUNCUBE-1            301.8 20.0    ?  1458 191.1  16.5
2013-11-22 12:29:41 FUNCUBE-1            254.9 10.0    ?  1991 191.9  16.4

2013-11-22 20:13:39 FUNCUBE-1            101.0 10.0  ecl  2112 288.7 -38.8
2013-11-22 20:16:50 FUNCUBE-1             57.3 18.8  ecl  1596 289.5 -39.3
2013-11-22 20:20:00 FUNCUBE-1             13.4 10.0  ecl  2096 290.2 -39.8

2013-11-22 21:48:09 FUNCUBE-1            169.4 10.1  ecl  2111 315.2 -51.0
2013-11-22 21:52:47 FUNCUBE-1            256.3 77.8  ecl   691 316.7 -51.5
2013-11-22 21:57:23 FUNCUBE-1            343.5 10.0  ecl  2095 318.3 -52.0

2013-11-22 23:28:12 FUNCUBE-1            252.5 10.0  ecl  2114 354.3 -57.6
2013-11-22 23:29:59 FUNCUBE-1            275.4 12.0  ecl  1976 355.1 -57.6
2013-11-22 23:31:46 FUNCUBE-1            298.3 10.0  ecl  2109 355.9 -57.6

Steve G0KYA

Good autumnal HF conditions are back

Got a real shock this morning. Was playing with a little Realistic DX-394 receiver, which is more cute than a serious HF receiver. Anyway, I had it connected to a dipole in the loft and thought I heard someone sending "VK" on 20m CW.

Sure enough it was VK2PN Pat in New South Wales working a host of Europeans. Switching to my Icom 756 Pro 3 and the trusty 20m Off Centre Fed Dipole, which is hung from a tree, and at times he was peaking 599.

I diligently waited my turn to call him - and then he got spotted on the DX cluster. At this point all hell broke loose with OMs, YUs, ITs and everyone else piling in.

Anyway, the moral is that Autumn brings good HF conditions and the greyline long path to Australia suddenly becomes very attractive - see the image from VOAProp above. The K index had been up to 5 overnight, but this path doesn't really go though the poles so was relatively unscathed.

Ten metres was humming on Monday with low power beacons being heard in the UK from Florida and New England. On Tuesday I heard nothing. With the bad geomagnetic conditions on Wednesday night I'm not expected much today.

I expect 10m to the USA to pick up a little later in the month.

So the moral is keep looking on the bands - you never know what you might hear.

Are we past sunspot maximum?

Just two days ago I published a podcast that looked at current solar activity and suggested that we are heading for a double-peaked solar maximum.

Two days later Tad Cook K7RA posted this for the ARRL:

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Much talk lately has centered around a possible dual peak in the current solar cycle. This would follow a pattern established in recent solar cycles. If this is so, the first peak probably occurred in the Fall of 2011. Now it appears that perhaps the second peak was in Spring 2013.

We are just a day away from the end of the month, so we won't see the actual averages until next week, but we can get a pretty close reading knowing the actual numbers for 29 of the 31 days in August.

The average daily sunspot number for the first 29 days of August was 92.2. This is above the levels for June and July, 80.2 and 86.2, but lower than April and May. This also pegs the 3-month average of daily sunspot numbers (centered on July) around 86.1, based on data from 90 of the 92 days in that period. This is above all of the three-month moving averages centered on September 2012 through March 2013, but lower than the previous three periods centered on April and May (106.4) and 97.5 for June.

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While working out when solar maximum is has always been an historical activity - you don't know you are there until some months later - this may not bode well for this Autumn. So start praying to the Sun Gods for more sunspots as an SFI of 100 is nothing to get too excited about.

But as I said in the podcast, conditions will improve naturally as we head towards late September due to a change in the ionosphere's molecular/atomic ratio (and therefore recombination rate) due to seasonal changes anyway. If you are looking for decent trans-Atlantic HF propagation it will be coming along soon. But we may have already seen the best of the decent 10m worldwide propagation - at least for another 10 years or so. Ho hum!

Podcast: HF Propagation, Autumn 2013

In this month's podcast I look at the current solar conditions and how the peak of cycle 24 may have already passed. I then look at what we can expect on the HF bands this Autumn and why conditions are likely to be better than they have been this summer.

Click on the headline to listen to the programme online or if you prefer to listen to it on your iPod search for G0KYA on iTunes.