Sunday, June 18, 2017

Towards the "Turning Point" 21st June

Optimistic ... yes a bit too optimistic

It seems I was a bit too optimistic with my ALA1530 antenna and restart of DXing (after more than 1,5 years of inactivity). Indeed the loop provides nice signals of European strong stations on MW and those still having their SW tx alive. But the fact is, that at my urban home QTH the noise level seems to be too high after all. There has been also some strange part of the SW spectrum with occasionally very high noise around 5 Mhz as can be seen at the screenshot using my good old SDR14 with a large spectrum view of 30 MHz.
On MW only a few "peaks" and some signals with audio has been observed since May 5th until today from the Western Hemisphere.
I have to compare the look at the spectrum at my rural QTH later on. Let´s see if the noise observed about 2 years ago there is still making problems of real dx.

Empty channels ?

Another interesting change compared a few years back on MW was the numeber of "open channels" for real DX, as many of high powwer Europeans have stopped broadcasting on MW. These frequencies includes a numer of Russians, German stations, French stations etc. This explains some good loggings of rather rare Far East and Australian stations even here in Southern Finland. Let´s see how the situation is next season.

Another Spectrum view (49 mb, 6095-6195 kHz)

I did some monitoring on 49 mb, usually only this small spectrum of the higher part of the band. What was interesting around 02 utc was that many of the strongest stations (that can be seen on the spectrum view) were one of rather small Latins like the Bolivian Santa Cruz 6134.8, North American CBC Canada 6159.97 and the Peruvian Radio Tawantinsuyo 6173.9. Of course there were two usual Bolivians on 5952.5 and 6024.97, but also some stronger international stations (China of course the strongest one). Anyway compared to situations a few years back it seems so interesting.
From Asia some of worth mentioning are Laos on 6129.97 , now free from the interference of The Chinese station and RRI Palangkaraya 3325 with the Ramadan program starting before 20 utc. There has also been an carrier around 3344.8, maybe Ternate is still active ?


Another DRM  on 810

When checking the MW I found again the typical DRM noise on 810. Could this be from Abu Dhabi or is there an European still doing some tests using DRM? Unfortunately the real "ID" could not been detected because of the low S/N ratio (maximum around 3-4 dB). Like earlier observation on 1440 (which I thing should be Pulpit South Africa - which is the only DRM here as far as I know - and actually recently found screenshot shows the  format "religion" - maybe worth while to check them...) only the "frame" without the real ID text was noted here).


I hope to test the ALA1530 at the rural QTH later on. And if the noise situation has improved there hope to get some bigger antennas as well before the next season.

The Summer Solstice is coming...
Soon - so I send You all who might be reading this the Very Best Wishes for the Summer Solstice 21st June! Indeed that happens on 21st June at 04.24 UTC!

73,TK



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