As a parallel effort to the Newfoundland and New Jersey DXpeditions, I did my own survey of the band for foreign DX over the weekend from home and on Monday night (7 NOV) from the salt-marsh site in Rowley, MA.
European DX has been good throughout this period with things shifted somewhat to the south, as contrasted with two weeks earlier when the Scandinavians, Germans, and eastern Europeans were putting in top-notch signals. Monday night's Rowley outing featured the usual "mouth-of-the-Med" pipeline with near-local quality signals from a number of stations in Morocco, Algeria, Portugal, Spain, and southern France. Northern European stations were present, with UK on 693 and 909 quite good, but most channels (e.g. 1134, 1215, 1314) where a high-power northern or eastern European was pitted against a lower-power Spaniard, the Spaniard was usually winning. A few highlights: 1584: Ceuta right at the other end of the sunset-period "RF bowling alley", completely local-like, amazing for the power it runs. 1035: a totally-blockbuster signal out of Portugal, excellent with WBZ phased. This should have the "steam" to make it to the West Coast. 801: uncommon Spain // 855 quite good over an Arabic-sounding station that may have been Jordan. Not much weaker than the adjacent 800 PJB/VOWR/CJAD/nulled WNNW imbroglio. 1062: Italy tops at 2257 with II talk 1500.26 unID het against WTOP/Dos Mil mix 1530a: a het grumble soup with 1529.54 (Uruguay), 1529.93 (??), and weak 1530 (WCKY/WVBF) 1550: RASD Tindouf, Algeria back to its old loud self at 2342 UTC with rustic North African music totally blowing away the domestics on the channel. It was slopping up usually-easy R. Sawa - 1548. 1080: SER Spain easily punching through WTIC/YVQJ mix 1030: domestic weirdness - a fairly strong station with Fox National Sports Report in WBZ null at 0020 UTC. Somebody's throwing way too much RF towards the Boston area on 1030! 594 & 963: // Portugals (R. Renascenca) 927: unID with back-to-back modern dance-club music; not // Renascenca (0036 UTC) 882: bucking the trend, UK over COPE synchro's: absolutely slamming in with ZZ Top song, UK DJ @ 0038 720: Portugal overrunning CHTN's new wimpy night signal ! Classical guitar // 666 702 & 612: both out of Sebaa Aioun, Morocco - both huge - different programs 585: Spain almost equal to WEZE/VOCM-590 level, that's close to 74.7 dBu (5.43 mV/m) per the V-Soft guys - wow! I'm sure that sitting out in the salt-marsh beefs this one up at least 20 dB over what I get at home. Tons of other Spain, of course, including the SER little-engines-that-could on 1539 and 1521 nudging by the upstate NY 1540 and 1520 blowtorches. Some Latin Americans noted (e.g. the monster YV's on 750 and 1110) and the Caribbean splits (535, 555, 895) were all good, but TA activity was too good to spend much time on stations that would be significantly better during a serious aurora. I'll try to have the logs done up by Friday morning for Bruce Conti's IDXD column. Those NL and NJ DXpedition logs are going to be one interesting read. Maybe Europe, South Africa, and Down Under will chime in with their takes on this week's conditions. And I wonder what's up out on the West Coast after the roaring success of October's Grayland gig. Mark Connelly, WA1ION Billerica, MA, USA ---[Start Commercial]--------------------- World Radio TV Handbook 2005 is out. Order yours from http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0823077942/hardcoredxcom ---[End Commercial]----------------------- ________________________________________ Hard-Core-DX mailing list Hard-Core-DX@hard-core-dx.com http://arizona.hard-core-dx.com/mailman/listinfo/hard-core-dx http://www.hard-core-dx.com/ _______________________________________________ THE INFORMATION IN THIS ARTICLE IS FREE. It may be copied, distributed and/or modified under the conditions set down in the Design Science License published by Michael Stutz at http://dsl.org/copyleft/dsl.txt