As an experiment, I made a recording of the activity levels for each of the HF bands on the WSPRnet website on Sunday the 7th of July 2019. I took two measurements to get a better sample... one at 09:00 UTC and one at 19:00 UTC.
160m, 80m & 60m... Even though the levels on 160m and 60m are reasonably low, the wide coverage area for these bands would probably make up for this somewhat. Even on 160m, someone running 5 watts into a decent antenna may cover half of Euope.
40m, 30m, & 20m... This seems to be where most of the WSPR activity is concentrated. Lots of people transmitting and lots of people listening.
17m, 15m, 12m & 10m... On these bands, the propagation skip zones become increasingly larger especially at the higher frequencies. My own opinion is that the activity level needs to be somewhere close to 100 to make WSPR useful.
Going on this basis, the activity levels on 17m and 10m are marginal. From a European perspective, there are two issues...
a) Many of the other stations are in other continents may be well out of range.
b) A high percentage of the users are receive only.
This leaves relatively few stations to listen to.
And if 17m and 10m are marginal then 15m and 12m are very poor indeed. The number of users on 12m was 13 and 18 and again, these are spread out over different continents and some are receive only. If there are so few stations on 15m and 12m then it begs the question if WSPR on those bands is useful at all?
VHF... On the VHF bands, the number of WSPR users recorded was very low.... an average of 26 on 6m, 3 on 4m, 18 on 2m, 4 on 70 cms and 5 on 23 cms. Those activity levels are so low that it makes WSPR pretty useless unless someone is interested in monitoring the path to a particular individual.
2 comments:
Interesting post. And true of course. 12m is the most difficult band on HF. Almost no one listening there. Another problem is the amount of WSPR transmitters, I think the number is twice the receiving stations and that is a pity. I'm WSPRing since 2009 and try to be heard with 1W WSPR in as many DXCC as possible. So far I am at 92 DXCC, most of them on 20m. It looks easy but it isn't.... 73, Bas
Bas, I guess part of the problem is that most guys are only interested in making contacts where as WSPR is a beacon mode.
The fact that you have been heard in only 92 countries in 10 years says a lot. Outside of Europe and N & S America, there isn't much activity.
Post a Comment