The Science and Technology Museum has issued a notice to the General Public that its facilities are closed until further notice, presumably due to the COVID-19 virus containment situation. As all facilities are closed, this includes the OVMRC meeting room, therefore the March OVMRC meeting is cancelled by authority relayed to me by Norm, VE3LC, Club Vice-President. We will continue to monitor the situation with hopes that we can resume with the next scheduled meeting in April.

73,

Hugo, VE3KTN.

Now that we’ve gone through the December solstice and are approaching the March equinox. I figure it’s about time to update what’s happening with the 80 metre band noise trends.  The solar flux remains quite low and constant, essentially unchanged from a nominal value of 70 since July 2019.  Despite this, the band does open up quite well in the evening and there’s a lot of DX to be had on FT8.

Regarding the 24 hour noise floor snapshots, I now have a set from October 2019 to March 2020 – roughly 6 months covering a period about 2 weeks after the 2019 equinox to 3 weeks before the next equinox.  I’ve combined the charts into a mp4 movie with each month’s record pausing for 10 seconds.  If you have a decent mp4 media player (such as VLC) you can pause in the transition regions to examine more closely how things change from month to month.

Quite frankly, I was encouraged to see the change in the diurnal noise floor between October/19 and January/20, but things don’t seem to be changing as quickly as I thought between January and March.  Maybe there’s a lag and an effect associated with the solar analemma that I haven’t considered yet.  Anyway, here’s the movie for your pleasure.

73,

Hugo,
VE3KTN.