Madeira HF beacon CS3B back on air after forest fire

Back in October of 2023, I had a post on the blog about how the HF radio beacon CS3B on the Portuguese island of Madeira was destroyed in a forest wildfire on the 12th of October 2023... See HERE

After a 9-month break, the beacon returned to service on the 3rd of July 2024. The photo above shows the new ICOM IC-7200 which replaces the old one which was destroyed in the fire.

CS3B is part of the International Beacon Project which is a series of HF beacons operating on 14.100, 18.110, 21.150, 24.930 & 28.200 MHz.

New antenna

On the 4th of October, I had a listen and I could hear the beacon on all five frequencies from 20m to 10m in the space of 75-seconds. It's easy enough to try. All you need to do is set the VFO on each band to the frequencies above and the once the sequence starts, you start on 20m and go up a band every 15 seconds.

The sequence for the beacon can be found here.. https://www.ncdxf.org/beacon/

The beacon is about 2230kms from my location which is ideal for one F2-layer hop from the ionosphere. The fact we're at sunspot maximum and it's a north-south path, F2 layer propagation even on 28 MHz will support these shorter skip distances.

If you want to check the path to your location then use this site and mess about with the values... https://soundbytes.asia/proppy/p2p

FT8 activity nights on the VHF/UHF bands - Q4 2024

There are FT8 activity nights on the VHF & UHF bands every Wednesday evening in Europe for the 4th quarter of 2024.

The European activity evening which uses both FT8 and FT4 rotates through the 2m, 70cm, and 23cm bands each week. Activity is from 17:00 to 21:00 UTC.

This might be an opportunity not only to try FT8 on the higher bands but also just to have a listen and feed the reception reports up the the PSKReporter website.

Further details available at www.ft8activity.eu