Chapter 4 Band conditions

Hams with HF privileges like to check in on band conditions from time to time since the conditions change regularly just like the weather.

The main things to check are what bands are open to what places. The band or frequencies we can use to communicate with different places vary by time of day, time of year, current and long-term solar conditions.

Here are some resources to see how the bands are doing.

HF propagation

The hfpropagation.com site has some great visualizations about conditions on HF.

For example, the following shows a map of HF RF propagation centered on New York City:

Figure 4.1: Propagation map centered on NYC from https://www.hfpropagation.com

VHF propagation

The dxview website shows DX conditions on the 2m VHF band. These are typically much more short-lived than DX openings on the HF bands.

Here is a screenshot of conditions observed around 2023-04-18 around 1820 UTC.

Figure 4.2: VHF DX propagation on 2023-04-18 from https://vhf.dxview.org

The same site has a cool animation of HF propagation conditions, as well at https://hf.dxview.org.

PSK Reporter

The pskreporter.info site aggregates thousands of signal reports from hams all around the world.

For example, here is a real-time map of conditions right now.

Figure 4.3: https://pskreporter.info/pskmap.html

WSPR Rocks

The wspr.rocks site provides some terrific visualizations of the latest Weak Signal Propagation Report (WSPR) data.

Here is a map showing data about which WSPR stations are hearing one another on 2023-04-02:

Figure 4.4: https://http://wspr.rocks

And here is a plot of frequency vs. distance.

Figure 4.5: https://http://wspr.rocks

20m, 17m, and 15m were long (supporting long distance or DX contacts) at the moment this figure was taken.