The next meeting of the Story County Amateur Radio Club will be at 7:30 pm, Thursday, April 7, 2011, at the 4-H building on the southwest corner of 13th Street and Stange Road in Ames (but actually off of Wanda Daley Road)..
The program for the April SCARC meeting will be something like "A DXer’s View of HF Propagation and How to Take Advantage of the New Sunspots" presented by Chuck, WA0ROI.
The sunspot numbers have increased dramatically over the past month or so and the HF high bands (30 to 10 meters) have been particularly hot recently. It has been possible to work all continents during the day on 10 meters (East in the morning and West later in the day) and 30 meters has been staying open all night.
In order to take advantage of these conditions for long-distance communications, it is helpful to understand how solar activity impacts radio propagation and how to use some of the many Internet/computer tools to help predict radio propagation. Some of these tools include propagation prediction tools (e.g. W6ELProp, VOACAP, and HamCap), Gray Line software (e.g. DX Atlas), Space Weather web sites (e.g., http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/forecast.html and http://dx.qsl.net/propagation/), and MUF maps (e.g., http://www.spacew.com/www/realtime.php).