W4FT on Amateur Radio

Last week, I replaced the HGSW beam with a full wavelength 80 meter Skywave Loop Antenna. The antenna is about 285 feet long and is suspended between four trees at about 80 feet high, roughly shaped as a trapezoid (two parallel sides). It is fed with about 100 feet of 450 ohm ladder line into a 4:1 balun, followed by about 20 ft of coax into the radio.

Reason for change:
While the HGSW beam performed well on 80 meters, it was only marginal on 40 m and not dramatically better than a dipole on the higher bands. Lately though, it has become almost impossible to tune it on 40 meters. Read more…

NASA reports an M-9 class solar flare erupted around 03:59 UTC this morning (around 11 pm EST Sunday night) from sunspot 1402. Just short of an X-class flare, it is expected to arrive around 14:18 UTC Tuesday, Jan. 24th (around 9:18 am EST), give or take 7 hours. This follows an M-3 flare from sunspot 1401 that erupted between 15:15 to 16:30 UTC Jan 19th. The resulting CME arrived around 06:30 UTC (1:30 am EST) Sunday morning, Jan 22.

Does this mean that solar activity is suddenly ramping up in intensity? Will we be getting better and better HF propogation in the immediate future? We’ll have to wait and see.

For more details, check out http://www.spaceweather.com/