Hello Ventura County Hams,
Summer is great: the family is all out of school, we get to go hang at the beach, travel out of town, and enjoy not having to do – or grade – homework. And while I will mourn the passing of the educational summer now that those around me are firmly established back in the classroom, it does leave slightly more time for radio related activities. So, what is on the horizon?
Have you been wondering why we are at the peak of the solar cycle with record high SFI numbers, but propagation seems to be… not great? I posted a link to an article by Tomas, NW7US, to our club’s Groups.io page that explains why summertime in the Northern Hemisphere wreaks havoc on propagation. It’s not an overly technical read, and I hope you find it as informative as I did.
Why Is Propagation on Shortwave (HF) Terrible Right Now?
The good news is that fall is rapidly approaching, so we can hope for some better HF conditions to gradually appear over the next month or two and into the new year. This is a great time to make sure your HF setup is ready to go for the DXing season.
For you Technicians out there, now might the time to consider getting yourself on 10m if you aren’t already. As the days get shorter and cooler, with any luck 10m (and the other HF bands) will get hotter and longer!
With conditions hopefully improving, I will be restarting the CQers Club outings to Ventura State Beach. I would like to do at least one more official POTA activation this year, which I will do my best to provide more than a week’s notice for. I will also post to our Groups.io page if I decide to do any spur of the moment trips to the park for those of you with more flexible schedules.
We just had two expeditions to highly wanted entities back-to-back: N5J on Jarvis Island in the South Pacific, and CY9C to St. Paul Island off the coast of Newfoundland. I found N5J much easier to work from my QTH in Upper Ojai, getting them in my log on every band I could except for 12m. St Paul Island proved much more difficult, as they may have been beaming away to Europe most of the time I was able to listen… but I did get them a couple times. I hope you got them in your logs as well!
(A little insider-baseball tidbit: Adrian KO8SCA, who gave a presentation to our club on expeditions earlier this year, was on location at both Jarvis and St. Paul! I’m not sure when he has time for his real job.) I will continue to post the ARRL updates for expeditions and other entities on the air, as well as some real-time observations, on Groups.io for those of you who find it helpful. Also keep an eye out over the next month for some posts from me about the CA QSO Party and CQ Worldwide contests.
GL on the bands and have fun!
Jacques
KN6VQ
