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Camb-Hams DX Blog

It seems 20m has been behaving very strangely today… us barely hearing stations, yet getting 5/9+40 reports back! The majority of stations we’re hearing on 20 are giving us much better reports than we’re giving them, but there’s some who are the same both ways. And a few who nearly knock the end-stop off the meter (S58AL I’m looking at you)!

I’d love to know what’s going on – different radios give the same result, we’ve tried taking the linear and filters out of the system, all fine. We are using a linear, but only 3-400W, and I’m assuming a significant number of those calling us are running quite a bit more. But even if they’re only 100W, that’s only 6dB difference, not 40dB.

Interestingly the QRP stations seem to be getting similar results to the QRO guys :-).

So what’s happening? Hypotheses include some kind of geomagnetic effects, but we just can’t explain it yet… any thoughts very much welcome!

And apologies to anyone who’s tried calling us and who we didn’t hear!