Worst. Propagation. Ever. I usually don't go to the dike when the web SDRs confirm bad space weather indicators but last night I had to escape my 3000°C cozy attic apartment, so no choice.
I was really worried the antenna is broken, or the LNA, but all SDRs up here had the same absence of stations...well, almost. Of course I had residue signals where they didn't but I never had a day when I couldn't hear WWV and 20m was lacking signals above 14.250 and most of the Americas. The absence of enhancement by sun activity has never been a problem at "the dike", but during a blackout there is no trick or loophole making that not suck. Well, at least at this high latitudes - this morning I heard Italian and Spanish stations working DX just fine, but then again I heard some of the VK they worked too.
As for what I've learned about the antenna:
- The LNA doesn't seem to like it on MW and below. Not sure what's going on there, on LW it decreases the SNR with full gain, this is back to normal when reducing gain. (I can switch the power bank to 3.xV output, then the LNA decreases the gain to maybe 10dB or less.) On MW this seemed to happen too, but then it looked like it decreases the SNR only when the station is on the backside of the antenna, in other words it looks like there is some interaction between the LNA and the antenna, more gain = more directionality. Strange. This may also have to do with me being lazy - I just connected the LNA directly to the balun and maybe it's not a good idea to leave that much space and an LNA between the balun and the choke. I'll have another involuntary opportunity to check that tonight.
- Having incredibly faint residue signals from RNZ on 15720 and this morning on 9700 kHz gave me an opportunity to play with height: Going from 4m down to 1.50 (feedpoint) had no effect whatsoever on RNZ and at best a suprisingly little effect (I can't hear it on the audio recording) on the one clearly readable VK station this morning (VK3KJ). With the latter I also tried rotating again and got the impression that the signal came from W and not SW as expected, IOW the directionality was there, and since the signal dropped in N/S/E directions and the center was W, I guessed that's the path the signal took and was quite happy about the antenna letting me come to this conclusion.
- Obviously, the condx improved only a little in the morning but I still managed to hear faintly (some words readable) the Australia VOLMET on 11387kHz and Auckland VOLMET on 8828. Unfortunately I didn't bother with laying down the LoG due to the unrewarding conditions but the fact that I heard these stations makes me very confident that the amplified SDL is just as good if not better than the big LoG.
- Despite no appreciable tropo enhancement, I had a blast on FM! With so much gain to boot and 2 nice flat-ish lobes I could really hear through the entire radio horizon and a little beyond , I heard more southern Denmark stations than with the vertical, I got really great signals from all the 2m and 70cm repeaters around, I heard surprisingly far up and down the coast on the VHF marine band, and picked up an unknown to me zombie satellite on 136.695 MHz ("Shinsei MS-F2"). Seems that's quite the right RX antenna for a wideband SDR!