[UK-CONTEST] Uk activity on VHF

[Ian White GM3SEK]

Dave Sergeant wrote:
>On 7 Apr 2010 at 3:23, Regwoolley at aol.com wrote:
>
>> I note as always last night there were great levels of activity from the
>>  Manchester area as with Birmingham and a few other place's. However
>> some spots  on the map are almost white noise. For example my old home
>> of S Wales I had not  one QSO! Another area I don't often work is the
>> region north of Manchester to  central Scotland! You may say well that's
>> very rural but there are large area of  population in them such as
>> Newcastle and Carlisle. I wonder if any of you not  the same?
>
>I wonder if any of you 2m chaps noticed any auroral activity last
>night. In the past couple of days there has been a huge geomagnetic
>storm, with the HF bands being totally dead and there has been reports
>of auroral on VHF. Might have affected things in last nights contest.
>
>(myself I didn't even listen, though with the HF bands dead I might
>have found more QSOs there even with my vertical...).
>

GM4PMK's online magnetometer on the Isle of Mull has been showing this 
for the past few days:
www.marsport.org.uk/observatory

The red trace "By" is the east-west component of the earth's magnetic 
field, and the green trace "Bz" is the vertical component. Normally both 
traces stay close to the zero line in the middle of the graph, but 
either one can swing positive or negative - as you can see today.

There is also a link to compare today's and yesterday's traces, which 
often provides the answer to "What the **** happened in the CC contest 
last night?" Any disturbance tends to upset inter-G propagation on 80m, 
but the most productive auroras for VHF DX tend to be when Bz goes 
negative.

Well worth keeping as a permanent bookmark.


-- 

73 from Ian GM3SEK