A massive geomagnetic storm, reportedly the most severe one since 2005, resulted in nice aurora sightings… The picture above is taken from my antenna location in Woerden (JO22kc) with a simple iPhone camera.
It does mean that I’m a little bit in the “Dog Days” for DX… With sunny skies and thus solar panel QRM pretty much killing off MF/HF during the day, Aurora shutting down MF at night, and no sign of Sporadic E yet “radio life” is pretty dull.
Wow nice catch Peter ! Not DX this time, but beautiful Aurora 🙂
I went outside last night for a short while but did not see it.
Hopefully tonight, as there is still a high Kp8-index, so chances to see it here at my QTH.
Have been running my QRSS grabber last night and it did some funny weird things with the signals on 10 MHz.
You can check my grabber page here: https://www.qsl.net/o/on4cdj//qrss/
Check out the history grabs from around 22:00 UTC last night.
It’s running on 28 MHz right now and for the coming hours.
73 !
I learned a new word: QRSS grabber !
Yes that’s how they are called, a QRSS grabber….”grabbing” the very faint signals and make them visible on a specific piece of software. It’s verrrrry slow visible morse and mostly with power no more than a few hundreds of milliwatts, if not less. A complete callsign takes about 6 to 8 minutes. A nice tool for propagation purposes, a bit like WSPR. And a grabber shows nicely the ionospheric disturbances like aurora.
Some extra info here (and other pages on the interwebs): https://swharden.com/blog/2020-10-03-new-age-of-qrss/
73, Patrick
Thanks Patrick… I’m still thinking about getting my HAM license and running something like WSPR from my new QTH. We’ll see!
It’s outdoor time anyway. Never mind the mess on shortwave.
😉
True !
But unfortunaly, last night the conditions were less favourable for spotting aurora. 🙁
No luck once more here.