Wednesday, September 11, 2013

New band, new mode

As the summer is going by, a new band emerged. Two Greek stations, SV8CS and SV3DVO are transmitting on 136KHz almost every night. It is a  band given to us recently. So there is a lot of space for experimentation. Here is a receiving report of these stations in OPERA 8 mode using an active mini whip antenna.

sv3dvosv8cs

On the other the hand traditional bands are not going well. Propagation is unstable and usually  suffering of strong QSB. The 24 sun cycle is turned out to be the faintest for one hundred years. The diagram shows the big deference with the recent cycles 21, 22 and 23. The comparison is disappointing.

comparison_recent_cycles

There are rumors that the next cycle will be very faint as well. What a pity. Unfortunately, it seems that the golden era of  radio is over.

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