Its hot: Dublin Weather @ 22:48: Wind E 03Kt CLOUDY 14°C H 80% Rain 0.0, Yes 14C at 11pm, so the telly is on the blink.
I had a party when we forcefully removed NTL from my old residence, then I got a second opportunity to tell them PFO when I moved house. In Astra 28E FTA TV land with the Irish 4 stations coming in via a gutter top Yagi, summer comes and the snow starts.
Nice weather for tropospheric ducting, I used to think June came, we got school holidays tennis would come on the TV and the boys in RTE Relays / Cablelink went awol. Then I learned about tropospheric ducting and sporadic E (which is not the kind ravers use occasionally). The down side of the ducting is that one by one and you can follow them, the 4 irish channels get whacked, the up side is we get the rare chance to see far away pictures bounce onto our TV screens, or easier still French/UK FM radio hit our radio dials. Last Friday at 17:59 Rachael English (5-7 live) briefly explained that the problems with RTE signal was outside of their control.
Some of my mental logs of successes are Key 103 Manchester, Scottish Border TV and french and dutch FM unidentified radio signals. If there is a lift in the ionosphere I will scan around for signal but I wouldnt even call my call to this side of nature even amateur, just anoraky. 2 years ago NTL was claiming to relay digital BBC on the analogue cable in Dublin, the snow on the TV proved otherwise.
So if you see diagonal lines scrolling on your TV this season, its ducting. Happy DX’ing.