{"id":55580,"date":"2023-02-05T06:00:27","date_gmt":"2023-02-05T10:00:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/swling.com\/blog\/?p=55580"},"modified":"2023-02-05T07:23:27","modified_gmt":"2023-02-05T11:23:27","slug":"guest-post-old-fashioned-band-scan-after-the-solar-storms","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/swling.com\/blog\/2023\/02\/guest-post-old-fashioned-band-scan-after-the-solar-storms\/","title":{"rendered":"Guest Post: Old Fashioned Band-Scan after the Solar Storms"},"content":{"rendered":"

Many thanks to SWLing Post<\/em> contributor, TomL<\/a>, who shares the following guest post:<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Old Fashioned Band-Scan after the Solar Storms<\/h1>\n

by TomL<\/strong><\/p>\n

This is just an old fashioned band scan to randomly see what I could hear after last week’s solar perturbations when the Solar Flux Index went well over 200.\u00a0 I considered what I could hear on the shortwave broadcast bands, even though the SFI had quieted down to around 135.\u00a0 Would the ionosphere still be holding on to the charge built up during the solar storms?\u00a0 The date and time was January 30, 2023 around 1400 through 1600 UTC.\u00a0 By the way, as of today (February 2), the bands are dead and cannot hear any of these even though the Solar Flux is about the same!<\/p>\n

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I will not have time to describe my antenna setup now at my noisy Condominium in detail.\u00a0 I have been experimenting with a DX Engineering NCC2 antenna phasing device for the past year with somewhat good results.\u00a0 I had to place dedicated receive antennas in many different ways in order to find an arrangement that works in conjunction with the two Ham Radio antenna wires out on the porch.\u00a0 Sometimes it helps by lowering the noise, sometimes the native antenna by itself, or peaking the signal,\u00a0 has better reception even though it might be slightly more noisy.\u00a0 By matching one of two receive-only antennas (the left Heathkit switch) with one of the Ham Radio antennas (the right Daiwa switch), I can usually eke out some extra decibels of signal-to-noise improvement. <\/p>\n

On this day, I woke up thinking about just tuning to the 31 meter band.\u00a0 It ended up that I kept going up the dial and just kept recording from my AirSpy HF+ SDR.\u00a0 Below are ten audio clips, mostly in Chinese or Other, and mostly strong stations that many of you can easily hear, but for me can only be done outdoors in the zero-degree weather.\u00a0 Some are listed as only 1 kW power.\u00a0 All broadcast parameters are from the short-wave.info web site, so I hope they are accurate (Station, Language, Power & Location, Time & Frequency).\u00a0 Some noise reduction done in Audacity and Normalized to broadcast volume (-1dB) but turn up the volume anyway.\u00a0 Enjoy!<\/p>\n

Audio Clips<\/h1>\n