Radio Propagation: "Are we there yet?"
As many of us are loading the car and shuttling kids to grandma’s house for Christmas festivities, we’re preparing ourselves for that infamous question… “Are we there yet?”
HF ham radio enthusiasts are undoubtedly asking something similar of Sol. Hitting the bottom of the sunspot cycle trough between cycle 23 and cycle 24 has tested my patience a bit. The lowband DXers are having some fun on 80 meters and 160 meters, but I’m still “lowband antenna” challenged. A new set of antennas (for 40-10 meters), a tower, etc. certainly help but without some decent HF radio propagation indices, breaking through to the E4 dxpedition to Bethlehem just couldn’t happen.
At least we saw some sunspots in December though (at one point the sunspot number was in the mid-40s, but it has since dropped back to 0). That’s the best set of numbers we’ve had since June. I’m hopeful that 2008 will launch sunspot cycle 24 leading to some great HF radio propagation conditions.
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I’m hoping so too! It will be nice to have contesters be able to use more bands than 160-20 as there is a lot of room on 15 and 10 to spread out the activity.