Monday, May 17, 2021

WSPR North-South Divide on 28 MHz - 16th May 2021


Sunday 16th May 2021: This was similar to the previous few days with plenty of Sporadic-E on 28 MHz but it was less intense. I heard 465 WSPR transmissions from 71 different station on the band.

The unusual signals on this day was the appearance of TA4/G8SCU in Turkey and TF3HZ in Iceland. 

There was some short skip to the UK as well with 15 stations heard but it didn't seem as good as previous days.

I was also reminded about one of the main issues with WSPR on 28 MHz i.e. the lack of stations in some countries.

North-South Divide: As you can see from the map above, there is a real lack of signals from the south of Europe. For example, there are hardly any WSPR signals coming from Portugal, Spain, France and Italy.

When I was monitoring the 10m WSPR band on Sunday evening, I hadn't decoded anything in over an hour. I thought the band was closed. I then switched over to FT8 and there were plenty of stations coming through from Spain, Italy and Brazil.

It really is hard to beat FT8 in terms of getting an overall idea of where the band is open to.

QRSS (Very Slow Morse): With the skip going long, I managed to get a screen grab of the QRSS signals from TF3HZ in Iceland.

No comments: