I was already checking the FM band almost every day to see if there were some Sporadic E (Es) conditions. On the FM list site I saw some colleagues making receptions from the Baltic a few days ago. But I didn’t receive a thing. Unfortunately in that direction my view is blocked by an apartment building. Between South East and West however I do have a relatively clean line of sight. But many of you know how it is: you start to doubt your set-up and coax connections if nothing materializes.
Yesterday afternoon the FM band almost exploded however. From 1400 h UTC I heard multiple stations. Initially from Algeria and Tunisia, towards the evening from Italy. I still have to browse through my recordings on the Elad FDM S3 (the first time that I tried to make 24 MHz full band width recordings) and see how that worked out. But below you can see what I already logged in parallel on the ICOM R8600. The antenna is a 5 elements Yagi at 7 meters.
Only problem is that in Italy many stations have multiple locations on the same frequency. So I guess that my receptions from Northern Italy are in fact from locations a little bit more to the centre of Italy around Rome. This makes more sense for a single hop. But I’m learning as I go.
87.6 ALG Radio Laghouat
88.2 ALG Chaîne 2
88.5 I RAI Radio1
87.5 I Radio Maria
87.6 ALG Chaîne 3
88.3 E COPE
88.4 I RTL 102.5
88.0 TUN Radio Zitouna FM
89.1 I RAI Radio1
88.6 I Radio Radicale
95.1 I Radio Maria
101.9 I Dimensione Suono Roma
107.3 I Radio Radicale
92.0 I Radio Kiss Kiss
91.8 I RDS
105.1 I Radio Kiss Kiss
94.6 I RAI Radio1
Must be exiting to be able to search through the I/Q recording instead of tuning like mad with a vintage receiver 🙂
When I was young, I heard an Italian station on my FM radio which I did not understand at the time. It must have been early June. First time I witnessed sporadic E on the FM band.
Have fun!
Best regards, Henk (PA2S)
Hallo Henk, thanks for your comment! Yep I also vividly remember how 40 years ago I received my first Spanish FM station from Jerez la Frontera. That was on my Grundig Satellit 3400. You didn’t know where to tune to… and it was so difficult to ID a station. Now I have 3 hours of full band FM during the June 2nd event stored on my computer… it will take another week to sort through all of that!