Here in Skegness, the sporadic E season didn't get going until mid June. Openings had mostly been sparse, with poor signals and very much 'bottom of the band'. The same poor conditions seem to have been felt elsewhere in the UK too, whereas band 2 DXers in eastern parts of Europe had openings more consistent with an average Es season.
Once we'd cleared the 20th June, things took off in a big way with the more familiar cross-band 'soup' you'd expect from more intense Es propagation. Signals were strong at times, but still not as strong as those experienced in the 2014 season. I base this on signal measurements taken on the Konrad XDR-GTK software. The strongest Es signals this year were from the Italians (usually the case), giving an approximate 7dB down compared with the strongest Italian signals from the 2014 season.
It wasn't all bad. In fact it was a season of contrasts. I feel like I have just been through my worst and best sporadic E season ever. Conversely, the 17th July saw my first 'double-hop' Es into the Middle East, with Istanbul stations reaching the top of the band. I thought I had moved to Istanbul! Signals actually reached GOOD levels with instant RDS right up to 108.0 MHz. Cyprus and Lebanon also made their debut appearance this year.
Had it not been for my Elad FDM-S2 SDR receiver, I could easily have missed most, if not all of those exotic catches. I had to go out during the peak of the conditions and left the FDM-S2 recording the bottom of the band which, in this case, is 87.4 to 93.4 MHz.
The Elad FDM-S2 has been nothing short of revolutionary and, without this, I would certainly have seen my smallest annual Es logbook ever, but the opposite has been true, with hundreds of loggings made on many days. This major advancement in receiving technology comes at a cost though - and I am not referring to the price. I have written elsewhere about the pros and cons of band 2 SDR DXing, but the benefits far outweigh the disadvantages, the main disadvantage being the huge number of recordings which result. These are going to take me until Christmas to go through, so if anybody is wondering where my logs are this season, I am almost two months behind with these and will post as I have finished going through each day's files.
Aside from sporadic E, tropo and scatter has been hugely disappointing this season. There have been a few nice tropo surprises along the way, but most of the enhancements felt in East Anglia and the south-east of England have missed me completely. "So near and yet so far", as the saying goes. Good continental conditions have frequently been right on my doorstep, but never quite made it over the threshold and into the shack. The boundary seems to have been set in The Wash, the large bay immediately to the south of Skegness.
Scatter has been considerably down compared to last year with very few days of anything close to normal. But why? One of those annual variations I suppose.
Speaking of the weather, The Wash has had a very definite blocking effect on things this summer. The heavy rain and severe storms which have frequented this side of England this summer have just stopped or fizzled out completely after reaching The Wash. I often wonder exactly what effect The Wash has on DXing. I know parts of The Wash usually freeze over in the winter due to the waters being so shallow. In fact this part of the North Sea is shallow too and is only around 50 metres deep off our coast.
We haven't had a summer this year. Officially the sunniest coast in the UK, the east coast has probably seen more days of cloud than sun. I can recall an entire week when no sun was visible at all. Temperatures have often been around 15 degrees C. In the event of any heat arriving, the atmosphere just becomes unbearably humid as it mixes with the cooler air. When the rest of the country were enjoying their hottest July day on record with temperatures into the mid 30s (in the south-east of England), Skegness reached 27 C. I don't mind this, personally, as I don't like hot weather.
Summer 2015 has been a season of unseasonably high winds too. I have raised my antenna on a number of occasions, only to have to lower it again the following day due to high winds which have not been forecast. High winds have been another feature, hardly ever letting up. The real problem has been sudden violent gusts, the likes of which I have never experienced before. A powerful gust will appear very suddenly and we are sure we have felt the bungalow move. Venturing out reveals tree branches in the roads and the odd litter bin lying in the path of traffic. We have had a few trees blown down in the the more severe winds.
We simply don't have a local weather forecast here. What happens this side of the Lincolnshire Wolds is rarely predicted with accuracy in any weather forecast. It sounds like an exaggeration, but after having a radio friend staying here for a week recently, he too commented on how unusual our weather has been.
Rounding it all off, it's been a year of mixed fortunes, which is usually true to form, but without any real extremes, apart from the glorious sporadic E conditions of July 17th. But maybe even these were more 'normal' than we might think since the Elad FDM-S2 receiver misses very little.
Good DX!
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