DL0IGI 10m beacon in Germany heard via Auroral-E - 19th Jan 2026

On the 19th of January 2026, I noticed some posts on social media saying that the Northern Lights / Aurora Borealis was visible. Sure enough, I went outside to check and I could see the sky to the north was a red colour.

I went inside and tuned across the 28 MHz (10m) band and noticed that a few beacons were audible.

I was expecting to hear some distorted auroral signals but instead, the CW signals were clear, a sure sign of Auroral-E.

Most of the beacons were from Norway, Sweden and Finland but the one that caught my attention was DL0IGI on 28.205 MHz. This beacon is about 1500kms from my location and I presume the path was like the one shown above with the signal coming back off the auroral curtain.

The screengrab below is the audio spectrum of DL0IGI over a period of about 8-minutes.

I often hear this beacon via Sporadic-E during the summer months and on a display like the one shown above, it should be pretty much a straight horizontal line.

During the aurora, the signal seems to be refracted off a rapidly moving auroral curtain resulting in quite a bit of doppler on the signal. In the diagram above, the signal is jumping around by about +/- 20 Hz but sometimes, it went as far as +/- 60 Hz.

All of this jumping around gave the Auroral-E signal a distinctive quality. The 'mush' and spreading of the CW signal is not present yet there is still something strange sounding about the signal. The constant jumping around gives the CW tone a slightly hollow sound.

I checked the LA5TEN beacon near Oslo and this also had some doppler on it but a lot less. It was the same for the other beacons from Sweden and Finland.

I didn't spend too long on the band other than to listen for a while to a station on the Faroe Islands working a pile up of European stations on SSB. His audio sounded clear but again, it had a slightly hollow sound to it.

None of the signals heard were exactly rare DX but it was interesting all the same to catch this unusual opening.

Looking back at 1981 and the reception of BBC TV audio on 41.5 MHz in Texas

First of all, let's set the scene for a bit of context.

The original TV system in the UK was known as 405-line and was in use from 1936 to 1985. The lowest TV channel was B1 with the video carrier being on 45.0 MHz.

One unusual feature of this system was that the audio was AM and this was 3.5 MHz lower than the video carrier i.e. 41.5 MHz for Channel B.

Pat Dyer, WA5IYX was a very active TV DXer and logged many TV station over the years. Back in November of 1981 after the peak of solar cycle 21, he managed to hear the TV audio on AM on 41.5 MHz from several transmitters in the UK at his home in San Antonio, Texas.

The distance was about 7500kms and was most likely multi-hop F2 propagation.

Pat is now unfortunately silent key but he did send on the recording to Hugh Cocks, a long time TV DX-er himself and now living in the south of Portugal.

The audio can be heard below. See below the video for a description from Hugh.

Hugh writes... "He sent me the recording many years ago, I can't see it on his own channel so thought it was a good idea to post it on YouTube. There are very few 405 line TVDX recordings in existence.

Mainly BBC 1 from the Divis , Northern Ireland 405 line VHF transmitter on 41.5 MHz.

The Recording starts at 1738 UTC where the regions run separate promos. Divis dominates, around 30 seconds in 'Nationwide' can be heard which is almost certainly from the London area Crystal Palace transmitter on the same frequency.

At least one other signal is there too, maybe from Wales or Scotland or Redruth in Cornwall.

After 90 seconds or so they all combine to transmit the national news from London,

The rumbling/varying tone in the background at times is the beating together of the AM(amplitude modulated) audio carriers which are on fractionally different frequencies.

405 line VHF transmissions finished in early 1985."