[Lowfer] WWVB Eclipse Report

[JD]

On Tue, August 22, 2017 11:07 am, John Andrews wrote:
> When the SIW signals fell apart, WM, NC and MTI
> were going strong. They got into trouble later as the "sunset" path
> moved along.

The HiFER signals at the watering hole were also interesting here.  It's
good that solar flux has been in the high 80s lately, giving us more
opportunity to see and hear a variety of stations on the band.

I'd hoped that the temporary twilight/sunset would open the path from
Illinois, but it stayed stubbornly closed from a fairly typical early
morning appearance until the usual late afternoon return.  MTI, on the
same side of totality as I was, seemed to remain unaffected, showing the
same slow QSB cycle throughout as it did during the early morning and late
evening. USC faded away before the eclipse was noticeable here and
returned well after, except for 10 or 15 seconds of sudden increased
strength shortly before maximum dimness.

The track of totality did pretty much as expected to the path from RY and
NC to here.  They faded out, in that order, just as totality was crossing
the midpoint, and then returned in the same order. Shortly after, when the
darkness reached Dex's QTH, there was a noticeable frequency rise on NC,
presumably from the cooling caused by the eclipse.

Just before sunset, I started seeing frequency spreading on EH, NC, and
the SIW slant signal. It wasn't the obvious two or three signal multipath
we've observed before, but a spreading of carrier over a 1 Hz wide
swath...Mother Nature's spread spectrum.  When it reached that point, SIW
WSPR stopped decoding, even though it was still visible for a while
longer.  Found out a couple of hours later that we'd had an unexpected G2
storm.  By the time it subsided, most everyone was apparently gone for the
night.

JD