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.
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