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Steve
White G3ZVW
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6m activity from G3ZVW in October 2003
With the Sporadic-E season well passed, the band was pretty-much dead
for the whole of the month. However, on the 29th a coronal mass ejection
from the sun resulted in some spectacular auroral conditions.
By 1700 the band was open to many northern european countries.
During the course of the evening I used a fair mix of SSB and CW to work
LA, GM, F, OH, ON, G, EI, GW, PA, OZ, SM, ES and DL. Squares worked were:
JO28 IO87 IN94 KP12 JO89 JO01 IO80 IO91 IO97 IO86 IO88 IO52 JO03 JP70
IO81 IO91 IO63 JO32 JO55 JO54 IO90 IO81 IO94 JO01 KO29 JO45 JO56 JO22
JO65 IO86 IO93 JO33 JO22 JO45 JO21 IO67
Propagation was "interesting", and by that I mean
that some stations nearby were received completely via the aurora (e.g.
G3ZRH, who lives in Brentwood), whilst some distant stations (e.g. GM8LFB,
SM4XIP and ES2RW) had little or no hint of the aurora about them. Some
QSOs were auroral in one direction and non-auroral in the other - very
stange indeed!
On the 30th a much less intense aurora brought in a few weak stations.
Interestingly, at 2200 an SM7 was romping in here at 5/9+ with no hint
of auroral propagation being present on his signal.
What do auroral signals sound like?
On SSB, signals sound as though they have gone through a mincing machine.
Speech becomes extremely gurgly and difficult to understand. Auroral contacts
often take place using words which are spoken slowly, especially if signal
levels are weak. Contacts are short and phonetics used throughout. On
CW, the pure tone that we are accustomed to is completely gone and replaced
by a hissing sound.
Because of the effects that an aurora has on signals, thay are reported
in a different way. "57A" might be typical, where "5"
is the readability, "7" is the signal strength and "A"
is for Aurora. The same scheme applies to CW and SSB.
The reason auroral signals sound so different is that they are being reflected
by an ever-changing and rapidly-moving reflector (the ionised gases in
the aurora). This results in multi-path reflections and the introduction
of doppler shift into the signals.
Steve, G3ZVW
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