All heard near Moville Donegal between 1-4 April.

8879 Brisbane 1st for me on this freq.
6649 Atlantico
5670 Chennai
6535 Dhakar
5550 N Y
8861 ? to Springbok
6556 Mumbai
4675 Mumbai
11300 Mogadishu

Nice catches Ronan BANDIT.

Doing Cold Turkey here.No Airplanes.!!!

Ronan, I feel your pain

I keep on looking up at clear blue expecting to see a contrail...VHF is dead except for 124.70, is there no end to this misery

I presume lots of traffic on HF working Santa Maria avoiding Euro airspace.

Has the volcanic cloud had any influence on HF conditions ?

Me too! walking around looking up at clear sky.So strange to see nothing up there.HF conditions not affected though.Had good signal on 8942khz Singapore last night. Shannon VOLMET banging in on 3413Khz and 5505khz. Santa Maria busy enough yesterday.Re VHF -125.475-London Info.the busiest I have.122.4 Weston busy as usual with light aircraft if you are any way near there.Other than that nothing really.

Small bit of hope Santa Maria
New york and Shanwick active at present
on 5.598usb BANDIT.

8906 and 5598 were booming last night from 11pm on,New york were using 8906 and Santa maria 5598.I picked
up very weak audio on 8894,an african freq,RAF volmet also coming in clear on 5450

Were NY and SM any busier than usual Mick do ye think?

seemed normal enough,had a nice hit with iceland last night on 8891 with a JAL getting clearance,coordinates wer 81N 51W I think,there was 2 speedbirds and a KLM in SNN there,all gone now i think

New york hopping on 8918 around midnight last night,also 8894 was very busy but i couldn't identify the station,i would presume its an african station but im almost positive it wasnt tripoli,ive only got the radio back up and working around a week so i'l be goin mad for the next few nights!!!

Back from another trip to D na nG.

22/7 Jakarta 6656 20.45h S2/3
22/7 Tripoli 11300 20.50h S5 great signal
23/7 Atlantico 6649 23.47h S3 SELCAL with AFR443
24/7 Mumbai 8879 22.30h S2 SELCAL with AIC354 position
24/7 Dakar 6535 23.10h S3
24/7 Accra 8903 23.25h S3 BAW54 position
28/7 Picaro 8858 23.30h S2/3 IB6658 position

Nice catches Ronan
hf has being very good lately
BANDIT.

Thanks BANDIT worth trying if ye have the time.

Hi Ronan 5.616usb has been
very busy with mill air activity
comms with Shanwick,Santa Maria and Gander
worth listening to at night
all usaf
BANDIT

Thanks BAN will listen out.

This may be a rookie question and may not be the place for it but here it goes .
I drove a 5 foot length of copper pipe into the garden yesterday to act as a ground for my hf receiver . At first I didn't really notice any difference
but as the night wore on I started to search around and listen to the results with the ground connected and disconnected . I should mention at this point
that I have a distance of about 20 foot between my receiver and the ground . Also I have an end fed long wire directly into the back of the receiver .
After a while I happened upon 5517 khz . The signal was not really audible with the ground disconnected but when connected it was audible but not readable .
I understand that a longwire antenna is unbalanced and needs to be matched with an atu , so my question relates to the ground itself .
Is this the effect a ground is supposed to have on a receiver and also, Is the distance between receiver and ground too great ?
Thanks for reading guys

Edit : Changed Freq. from 5717 to 5517 khz .

The ground strap/wire should be as short as possible and use heavy gauge wire.

When using a long wire antenna I noticed huge improvemnet in noise levels when I bought a ferrite ring from maplin and wrapped the antenna wire around it as much as possible at the back of the receiver.

Have a look here also http://www.bobsamerica.com/grounding.html

Thanks Milan . Looks like I'll be moving my copper pipe
I might also give that ferrite ring a go if I can find one in maplin .

Just so you know, HF conditions are crap at the minute, Myself and Bandit were struggling to get Shannon volmet on 5505 last night. Might be something to do with the solar flares, so dont do anything too drastic, maybe just try and get you noise floor down as low as possible for the time being.
Knock off some circuit breakers in the house and see if they affect the noise on the HF receiver. That should help narrow it down.

Milan

I've Id'd a couple of the usual suspects so far , ie router , monitor and pc . I'll keep investigating . I found reception as poor lately but
was picking up Gander volmet tuesday night .

Hi Alsashin,Milan is right.Conditions very irregular this time of year so very hard to make any real judgement on any set up at the moment.Its only really when long winter nights come back that ye can really say how good your set up is doing.Mind you with the summer we`ve had.......

just to add to that
conditions are just
as bad tonite
shannon volmet quiet low
hopefully conditions will change.
BANDIT.

Same here BANDIT could hardly hear Shannon last night but banging in now(09.10h) on 3413.

Conditions back up again Ronan
Shanwick booming in on 5.649 S9
BANDIT

Thanks for all the input guys . As Milan suggested , I shall work on getting my noise floor down a bit for the moment !