Category: Sporadic-E

It is October 28. There is some snow outside and sub-zero temperature. Well, nothing indicates an upcoming Sporadic-E propagation… In the morning, few minutes before 9 UTC, I heard a foreign station on 93.9. I was not sure what’s going on, but after a short investigation I realized that CCIR band is really open to Tunisia and Italy via ionosphere – Es. Definitely rare thing at this time of year. Sporadic-E lasted for about 35 minutes and at ~10:20 everything faded away.

Since I have modded my XDR-F1HD I can receive also everything above ~60 MHz during Sporadic-E propagations. Studio-transmitter links are typically placed below the CCIR band, somewhere between 50 and 87MHz. They often carry a full MPX signal with stereo and RDS, so these signals are quite easy to identify. Italy has a very high amount of such transmitters. STLs usually have low power but they almost always don’t have a co-channel or adjacent interference during reception – this band is empty here!