Thursday, March 19, 2015

Solar eclipse

A solar eclipse is always a nice reason to experiment on the low bands. Especially 160m and 80m bands could be surprising when the solar eclipse is going on.

This solar eclipse will be on at Friday 20 March 2015. The local (Groningen) 84,7% solar eclipse begins at 09:33, maximum at 10:40 and ends at 11:51. All local time (UTC is -1 hour).

I understood that there will be activity on 160m WSPR from several stations in Iceland and Faroer Islands. It will be interesting to view how the solar eclipse is affecting the low bands. I will be QRV on 160m WSPR as well and invite everyone that has the ability to be QRV on 160m WSPR as well.

Update 20-3-2015: The solar eclipse has begun. So unfortunate I don't see activity anymore from TF4M on 160m since 6 UTC. It is nice to see the number of spots did decrease after sunrise. Now I expect to slowly get more spots when the eclipse evolves. I use my horizontal loop as endfed and 1W output power.

See: http://wsprnet.org/drupal/wsprnet/spots "Specify query parameters" call PE4BAS

8:08 UTC: 1 spot
8:14 UTC: 2 spots
8:24 UTC: 1 spot
8:40 UTC: 3 spots
8:56 UTC: 2 spots
9:10 UTC: 1 spot
9:18 UTC: 2 spots
9:38 UTC: 6 spots (max. eclipse here)
10:00 UTC: 8 spots
10:08 UTC: 6 spots
10:26 UTC: 1 spot
10:40 UTC: 2 spots
10:50 UTC: 1 spot



4 comments:

Paul Stam PAØK said...

hallo Bas, op 160 m valt een beetje tegen, maar wel veel mensen QRV op 160 m zie ik. 73 Paul PC4T

PE4BAS, Bas said...

Hallo Paul, valt mij helemaal niet tegen! Gemiddeld 80 stations op 160m WSPR nu. Zie het aantal spots hierboven. Leuk om te zien. 73, Bas

Photon said...

I ran a recording of an Icelandic commercial station on 207kHz, via a web SDR in the Netherlands. Haven't had time to analyse it yet. It stayed clear on Anglesey for almost all the eclipse, well past maximum!

PE4BAS, Bas said...

Would be very interesting to hear the results on the moment of the eclipse. I expected more radio amateurs would experiment during the event. But didn't see much in other blogs till now. 73, Bas