The 6m transatlantic path via aurora has been reported before by others and is certainly nothing new, but I’m beginning to wonder if it’s more viable than many might think. We had another decent aurora on 31st December, most of which I missed due to the New Year’s Eve celebrations, but I decided to check westerly conditions when I returned home sometime after midnight.<\/p>\n
Once again I was surprised to find the VE4ARM beacon (EN09at, 6011km) at a good strength at approximately 01:40z (Jan 1st) followed about ten minutes later by VY0SNO (FP53rs, 3653km). The opening was again quite short but there’s a possibility\u00a0the path might have also existed earlier in the evening? After I had spotted the beacons on the dx cluster, VE4ARM was reported by Tim, G4FJK in IO80 at a great distance of 6346km, and the VY0 beacon was reported from PA and DL.<\/p>\n
One fascinating little snippet: This time I managed to grab a decent recording of VY0SNO just before it faded. Listen very carefully to this clip, and you may be able to detect a sudden doppler shift of about +10Hz, 21.5 seconds in, coinciding exactly with a steep drop in the signal strength. I think that\u00a0helps visualise the auroral-Es path dynamics rather nicely!<\/p>\n