With a High pressure area established over southern Norway fresh Eastely winds are expected to dominate the weather today. Just now at around sunrise the air is calm and clear of cloud but filled with birdsong (blackbirds and sparrows mainly).
The 3cm beacon looks quiet. On the direct heading heading F5ZTR is visible in the waterfall and amplitude appears relatively constant.
GB3PKT whilst only about -15dBjt on the direct heading is considerable stronger (-13dBjt) on the heading for PI7ALK. This is anomalous as I usually receive the Essex beacon via a faint reflection (-19dBjt).
This beacon arrives from many azimuth angles when there is “weather” so I will note the signal and look around.
In the breeze it is a little difficult to keep the dish pointing to within 0.1 deg using the existing mounting arrangement. To reduce the noise introduced I average the spectrum over 10 seconds. Processing the signal is a topic I need to investigate and will return to later.
PI7ALK is a weak scattered signal (about 50Hz wide). Best description is that it is a smudge on the waterfall, amplitude and phase varying signficantly so that no sharply defined carrier can be seen.
This is the usual signal when the North Sea wave height is about 2m, and clear air (no cloud) conditions dominate. Troposcatter.
Varying the elevation angle shows that the signal peaks pointing at the horizon.
PI7ALK has drifted in frequency a little overnight to 10368.898.9 suggesting a cold night in Alkmaar.
In this quick bandscan no other signals can be spotted, apart from short burts on 10368.840 and 10368.972 probably aircraft scatter. The latter is likely to be DB0MU as I receive it frequently the ALK dish heading.
No signals are to be found with the dish pointing towards DB0GHZ. Even GB3PKT has disappeared. So all-in-all a few quiet start to the day.
It is no surprise that there is a sparsity of signals this morning as all the indications are that the wave height across most of the southern North Sea is well above 1.5m. Remember that evaporation ducts at 10GHz are unsustainable where wave heights are above about 1.6m. This seems to be the case this morning as indicated by this chart
