Radio Propagation
The VHF/UHF FT8 Activity Contest kicked off at 18h UT. See the contesters on this flythrough over Europe. 2m band contacts are the red lines, and as the contacts are mostly tropospheric, the signals are hugging the surface of the planet within a few km.
It's fitting that Dave, G7RAU (author of LiveMUF) is one of the contacts seen in this video (at the bottom end of Cornwall).
Radio Propagation
My Ionospheric Path Monitor has been adjusted to plot chordal hops correctly using accepted physics. Signals across the equator usually stay airborne for a considerable distance before coming back down to earth.
New orange "glow zones" show the potential zones for the airborne reflections from the ionosphere at around 400km altitude.
Radio Propagation
It's the evening in Australia and Japan, early morning in Western Europe. This is what the 10m band is doing right now, based upon DX CLuster reports.
Radio propagation visualised!
Radio Propagation
The 10m and 6m bands now have openings between Europe & Middle East to S America, and USA to S America, but the higher bands are fading as the sun sets.
Radio Propagation
Meanwhile, if you drop down to the 15, 17 and 20m bands, you'll get all the N American DX you need!
Radio Propagation
10m band (28 MHz) radio propagation between Europe and N America is poor this afternoon. From Europe, the band is open to S America, S Africa and the Far East.
Radio Propagation
You can use filtering to check the propagation for a single station, region country or continent.
Radio Propagation
Another demonstration fly-through using live data, recorded at 18h UT 28 March.
This time, only the 80m, 40m and 20m bands are selected.
We see the lower frequencies, mostly on the night-side of the planet, 10m on the day side. The lower frequencies are refracting from lower ionospheric layers than the higher frequencies do.
Radio Propagation
While we wait for the sporadic-E season to get going properly, here's a demonstration fly-through of this afternoon's global 10m to 2m band propagation, recorded live from amateur radio DX Cluster data with a five-minute cadence, at 17h07 UT 28 March.
The yellow lines denote 10m contacts. As you can see, there's not much going on above the 10m band at the time of the recording. All the lower bands have been supressed so as to make 10m clearer.
The number of hops and reflection locations any particular signal path makes are estimated and not real, but is based upon real factors such as ionosphere height, propagation mode and the MUF. Different frequencies reach different heights, as future videos will show.
Radio Propagation
Sporadic-E: High MUF upto FM band 2 is continuing over SE Europe this afternoon, as dusk approaches.
𝑮7𝑰𝙕𝑼 𝑹𝙍𝑫