Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor, Ivan Cholakov (NO2CW), who writes:
I never got a chance to summarize my results of the AM scans I did during the 2017 total eclipse.
I used an SDR and a 40 foot end-fed antenna located in a park near the Nashville, TN airport.
On the plus side I did notice a spike of AM signals and amateur radio signals especially on 40 meters. On the negative side, my AM scans were adversely affected by the nearby powerhouse WSM transmitter on 650 kHz.
I’ve attached my results in a spreadsheet [embedded] below.
Click here to view this Google Docs spreadsheet in a new window.
Fantastic, Ivan! Thank you for taking the time to go through your recordings and make these notes. No doubt, this log took a few hours to compile. I’ve yet to go through my eclipse spectrum recordings–!
Again, thanks for sharing!
Click here to view Ivan’s previous post which includes a bandscan of the 2017 Eclipse QSO Party.
Thanks Ivan for sharing. That was a very memorable event, to view as well as to listen. I still have not gotten an answer as to why I was only able to get out-of-state AM stations to the East of me and none to the West except for powerhouse KMOX. Must be something in the timing or directional effects of the decay in the ionosphere. Perhaps there is another chance in 7 years!
Last time I did that was in 1972, and what you will discover (both on AM and also on shortwave) is nothing short of amazing. Signals improve and degrade, and areas of the world open up like bay windows during peaks in eclipse activity. It is really fun to do scans like that (even though now on shortwave, the yield of results might not be that strong on the commercial broadcast frequencies).