Greyline enhancement

Today’s SDRs plus able software allow for some new insights into propagation. The figure at the top shows but one example: greyline enhancement. It follows the signal levels on 4750 kHz with a resolution of one second. Smoothing this cloud of points, reveals the more general course of signal level. Here we see, after sign off of Bangladesh Betar, the 10 kW transmitter of People’s Broadcasting Station at Hulun Buir coming up. Most interesting is its short-living enhancement just after sunrise at Hailar in China’s Inner Mongolia, squeezed at their borders to Russia and Mongolia.
This greyline enhancement can be observed regularily on frequencies under, say, 10 MHz: at sunrise at the transmitter’s site, first the F2 layer of the ionosphere is building up, being responsible of the signal of, here, about 5 dB. The lower and attenuating D-layer needs a bit more time to build up, leaving a short-living window for an enhanced signal.
This is to encourage also other HF aficionados to to use this technique.
Receiver: Winradio’s Excalibur Sigma
Antenna: active vertical dipole (2 x 5 m) MD300DX
Software: V3 by Simon Brown, G4ELI, QtiPlot and DX Atlas