Last weekend I retreated to Leitrim away from QRN (electrical noise) for a SWL (shortwave listeners) dx-pedition. It was to also double as a Star Gazing weekend but cloud cover did in any chance off deep space or stars, as did the just larger than half moon in the South West sky.
so the trusty back up of Shorwave Listening / Logging was all that we could do, (we = me and my twin brother Donal) anyway it was near zero degrees and I wasn’t that interested in frost bite just because the city glow was gone, for all that is said for city glow, a good sprinkling of cloud means no stars either way.
So we needed a long wire antenna and the local hardware provided earthing cable at €13 per 100M, the Dublin price was €50 :-). So we ran a longwire into the fields and hoisted it my means of twine and rock high into the pine trees and we were set for a weekend of DX.
One star we did se on saturday was the sun, in blue and clear skys during the daytime. Alas the sun spot activity that day and previous 48 hours was not going to assist us with shortwave reception. Put another way if there had have been activity it could have given some boost to certain wavelengths of the SW band, but we weren’t getting any boost.
Here is a small selection of what my log book captured.
3345Khz Radio South Africa 20:01:00 07/01/06 english
5541Khz Radio Stockholm ATC 20:58:00 07/01/06 english
5775Khz Mi Amigo International 21:48:00 07/01/06 english
there was plenty of activity on the 48 meter band and most of it Pirate from Holland. Site conditions were good, the city has too much background noise to pull out those really hard to hear weaker signals, and the DX pedition was a success.
If I ever get to retire I would love to build an earth station in the bleakest part of Ireland so I could listen to the stars near a real coal fire. Would the Leitrim Co. Co, allow an Earth Station ???