The aurora of 17th March 2015, St Patrick’s Day, was a superb event: It was good enough to propagate signals on 50MHz across the Atlantic, which I found particularly interesting. Unfortunately I haven’t had much time to get anything in the blog about conditions on 144MHz, so here’s an effort to get at least something recorded!

The QSO map for 2m looked like this:

EI3KD (IO51vw) QSO map for 144MHz during aurora on 17th March, 2015

The map shows a wide coverage from fairly well north into Sweden (SK0EN, JO99jx/1884km), all the way down to Croatia (9A1CAL, JN86dm/1867km), with the best distance being to the east, with SP4MPB (KO03HT/1932km) and SP4K (KO03HS/1933km).

Signals were generally quite strong, as demonstrated by a few audio clips:

Chris, SP4K, was a little weak in QSB during our QSO, but I heard him several times before and after at much better strength. At one point I was listening to SP4MPB working 9A1CAL and could hear both stations! I only started the recording at the end of my QSO with 9A1CAL (i.e. at around 16:50z) but have at least a couple of hours of audio after then, so might add some more clips as I find time – please leave a comment if you have a special request.

Finally, the full 2m log is here, which can be sorted by time, distance, etc, if you have javascript enabled:

"St Patrick's Day Aurora", 144MHz Log