BBC Mid-Winter Broadcast Results

Well I was going to post this yesterday.  However, I was attacked by a fiend with a torque wrench and a laser, who made off with nearly $600.  Yes, that's right, I had a dental appointment to have a crown re-attached to its implant.  And I was damed glad to get that emergency appointment too, I might add.  Mostly painless.  So... on with the post.  Blog post that is, not the dental kind.

As noted and described two days ago, Sunday just before 5:30pm EDT I drove down to Lafayette Park in Apalach and within minutes had a sort of half-assed inverted-V random wire antenna up (no, I didn't follow my own advice and string it vertically; I was rushed by the start time, and this was good enough) and plugged into my Tecsun PL-660 shortwave receiver (see inset – actual action picture).  Then... I listened.

Propagation condition numbers are on the left; click to embiggen.  Here's the short and sweet SINPO (signal, interference, noise, propagation, overall; each on a 1–5 scale):

9460 / 31m band Woofferton (UK):  nothing heard

9510 / 31m band Ascension I. (S. Atlantic): 35422 – very wavery signal, barely usable

12070 / 2m band Woofferton (again, UK):  35433 – not bad, not great, but perfectly useable; best of the bunch

Most of the half-hour transmission consisted of families sending well-wishes, interspersed with short musical clips.  It concluded with a short clip from the Bangles' version of Hazy Shade of Winter, and then ... silence and static.

As a small technical note for the non-technical, notice those frequencies.  They're about ten times higher than typical AM broadcast band frequencies – think of WWL at 870 kHz or WLCY at 1380 – and wavelengths go as the reciprocal of frequency, i.e., the waves will be about ten times shorter.  Hence, shortwave.  There you go.  So why do they travel so much farther than say regular broadcast AM or FM?  Short answer, just as different colors of light will refract differently in glass, different frequencies of radio waves will refract differently in Earth's ionosphere, high up in the atmosphere at the fringes of space.

So what was the point of all this trip, gear, and analysis?  Because it was there, and it was fun.  Oh, and pretty easy too – total prep time, maybe 10 minutes; set-up, maybe 5.  And oddly for Florida this time of year, no bugs.