Nils Schiffhauer – DK8OK

Propagation on HF differs from day to day. The nine diagrams at the top show the signal strengths of China Radio International’s Kashi transmitter, 500 kW, beaming to Romania; 08:58 UTC to 09:58 UTC from March 15 to March 23. The basic resolution (black grey points in the background) is 100 milliseconds, whereas the blue line marks the moving average with 601 points. The “moving average” can be best understood as a lowpass filter, revealing possible trends on a coarser scale. In this case, you cannot see such a trend.

If you compare a part of each transmission on a much finer scale, you even see sheer chaos, as the Figure below is showing:

There seems to be no visible correlation on any scale in this case. There are other cases where, however, some correlation can be found – to which I will come back in some future entries.

The last diagram at the bottom of this pages shows a much more forgiving picture of the signal: the average level changes not more than ±4 dB between best and worst days. This so-called box diagram illustrates best the actual receiving quality of the broadcast, demodulated with an synchronous detector to largely avoid severe distortion by selective fading. The difference of deciles 90% and 10% marks the fading range, a key figure in describing the quality of reception – see “Ionospheric Radio” by Kenneth Davies [London, 1990/96, pp. 232].

Analyzing signal strenghts, is an interesting tool to get to know more about propagation. I will continue this topic – stay tuned!

Receiver: Winradio’s Excalibur Sigma
Antenna: active vertical dipole (2 x 5 m) MD300DX
Software: V3 by Simon Brown, G4ELI, QtiPlot