Tuesday 1 February 2011

UK Propagation charts for February 2011

I have now published my UK HF propagation charts for February 2011. Regular readers will spot a small change - they are now colour coded. I never found the original charts very clear in terms of the reliability of the path, so I have now changed the software to show colour-coding for the reliability. Don't get too excited as the colours go down to less than 25% reliability - if you are running a SteppIR at 120ft and a linear you might find paths like that opening up. For the rest of us look for reliability of 40-50% or more. In case you hadn't noticed conditions have been dire for the last week or so - the solar flux is back down to 80-81 and openings on 21MHz and 28MHz are seemingly non-existent. Or are they? VP8ORK on South Orkney Island (take a look at map to see where it is - Falklands and head south) has been worked from the UK on both 21 and 28MHz so paths do open up, albeit weakly and not for very long. Fingers crossed for some more sunspots. For a general overview of propagation conditions please refer to my posting for December/January. While we will move more towards equinox conditions later in the month I think what I said then still stands.

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