Capturing spectrum and logging band openings last night

My 31 meter band spectrum display last night. Strong signals across the board.

Waterfall display of the 31 meter band last night.

Last night, band conditions were superb above 7 MHz. Both the 31 and 25 meter bands seemed crowded with stations; for a moment, it felt like a true solar peak.

This morning, solar flares have dampened down the excitement but I imagine conditions could favorably change at times this weekend, so stay tuned!

I recorded the entire 25M band for a couple of hours yesterday evening and a large portion of the 31 meter band throughout the night. Fortunately, I had just invested in another Western Digital Caviar Green 3 TB SATA drive, so there was ample space to make these (very) large recordings. I think this brings my overall spectrum storage up to 12 TB!?!

I love the fact that these SDR band captures will make for good listening sometime this winter when the sun isn’t being so cooperative. I liken it to radio time travel, but I believe David Goren (of shortwaveology.net) said it best in a comment he posted in “Confessions of an SDRaholic: when 4.5 terabytes is not enough“:

“My approach to recording SDR band captures is like assembling a collection of fine wines. I tend to record captures when there are unusual propagational openings…and while recording a whole swath of frequencies for an hour or so you can still tune around and make discoveries and even record them singly.. And then once the capture is done, you have it as long as you want to keep it.. So, on a static-y summers day I can go to the shelf and pull down “Ye Olde Auroral MW Opening 10/15/11? or “Hot Bolivian evening on 60 meters.” and I can make discoveries to my heart’s content. Since I can listen to an hour’s worth of each frequency it will take a long time to exhaust the potential of any particular capture, esp. with the ability to refilter and change. multiple parameters of reception.”

See? (I tell my wife) I’m simply building my collection of fine wines!

Below, you’ll find some of the stations I logged last night (actually, this morning in UTC).

Logs:

31 meter band beginning 00:00 UTC, 25 OCT 2014

9410 BBC English Nakhon Sawan
9420 ERT Open/VOG Greek
9455 China National Radio 1 Chinese
9470 AIR National Channel Hindi/English (vy wk)
9475 WTWW English
9510 China Radio International Russian
9520 PBS Nei Menggu Chinese AND Radio Romania International Romanian
9565 Radio Tupi/Super Radio Deus e Amor Portuguese (QRM from CRI 9570)
9570 China Radio International English
9586 Super Radio Deus e Amor Portuguese
9590 China Radio International Spanish
9630 Radio Aparecida Portuguese
9645 Radio Bandeirantes Portuguese
9660 Radio Taiwan International Chinese
9665 China National Radio 5 Chinese or possibly KCBS Pyongyang Korean
9690 All India Radio English
9700 Radio Romania International English
9705 All India Radio English
9710 China Radio International Portuguese
9730 Adventist World Radio Manumanaw Karen or possibly 9730 Myanmar Radio Burmese
9740 BBC English (vy weak)
9800 China Radio International Spanish
9810 Radio Havana Cuba Spanish
9820 Radio 9 de Julho Portuguese
9855 Voice of America Tibetan
9860 Voice of Islamic Rep. of Iran Spanish
9870 AIR New Delhi Hindi
9880 Voice of America Chinese (vy weak)
9935 ERT Open, VOG Greek
9965 Radio Cairo Arabic
10000 WWV Ft. Collins