Power was shut off to my noisy urban neighborhood yesterday while crews replaced a power pole. For a long time, I have wanted to check my HF noise floor when the power is out, and yesterday was my chance. For days like this is why my station is solar-powered!
I expected to be surprised but I was absolutely blown away by what I heard. The 40 meter noise floor was at least *17 dB* lower than normal. I could hear layers and layers of signals that I never knew were there. Nets I never knew existed… I mean, have you heard of the Montana Sheepherders net, for pity’s sake? A midday 40 m pileup on a SOTA QRP CW station in Texas that I never would have had a prayer of hearing normally. The noise was so low that I could hear way, way down into the intermod of SSB signals—and most of them were quite yucky. I heard birdies and crud from washing machines from what must have been three blocks away. I heard the 7150 kHz 5th harmonic of a local AM station. By measurement on the P3, I confirmed that all of these signals would have been completely under my usual noise floor. On 20, it was so quiet I almost believed that the K3’s receiver had failed. WWV was coming in at a 56 dB signal-to-noise ratio. Interestingly, 80 meters was also quieter, but not by as much. I’m not complaining about nearly 10 dB less noise, but it’s too bad that power was turned on before dark, before I could really evaluate the conditions. When it gets this quiet, there are no ticks, crashes or noise transients of any kind... just a gentle rushing sound, so it ‘feels’ even quieter than it is. It was every bit as quiet as a forest Field Day a hundred miles from civilization. Yes, radio was amazing yesterday for six glorious hours. R, Al W6LX ______________________________________________________________ Elecraft mailing list Home: http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/elecraft Help: http://mailman.qth.net/mmfaq.htm Post: mailto:Elecraft@mailman.qth.net This list hosted by: http://www.qsl.net Please help support this email list: http://www.qsl.net/donate.html Message delivered to arch...@mail-archive.com
