Wednesday, December 1, 2010

This is utterly fascinating - a German radio amateur (DK6NP) heard echoes of his own call 46 seconds after TX

I am bringing you this from the website www.spaceweather.com. It is a story about a German radio amateur, Peter Brogl, who heard echoes of his own CW transmissions on 40 metres - FORTY SIX SECONDS after they were sent. There are some recordings also which I have linked at the bottom. Really fascinating stuff.

LONG-DELAY RADIO ECHOES: During the geomagnetic storm of Nov. 27th, a brief but intense G2-class event, amateur radio operator Peter Brogl of Fürth, Germany, experienced a strange phenomenon. Forty-six seconds after he transmitted his call sign at 7 MHz, he received an echo of his own transmission. "At first, I thought someone was playing tricks on me," says Brogl, "but I changed frequency, re-keyed my call sign (DK6NP), and got another echo." This went on for more than an hour, enough time for Brogl to make several recordings. First reported in 1927 by Norwegian civil engineer Jørgen Hals, long-delay radio echoes are rare and poorly understood. Unusual propagation conditions linked to solar storms is one of many possible explanations. Radio operators, if you experienced any similar phenomena on Nov. 27th between 1800 UT and 19:30 UT, please report your observations to Peter Brogl for correlation.

Click here to hear the audio files of the strange echoes

Wikipedia page about long delay echoes
Possible explanations of long delay echoes

2 comments:

  1. Hi Anthony, 46 sec. is extreme. I did hear a lot of echos from my own signal on 11 Mtrs back in the ninetees, but most of the time it was about a second, hearing the last word of my transmission. This could be a very QTH related thing, I don't think many did experience this at the same date/time. 73, Bas

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  2. This was relayed to us in the VHF net, absolutely great, will wait to hear more...Vu3sxe.

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