Beginning of the Sporadic E Season.

Monitoring FT8 signals on 10m has shown me two things:

1) F2 propagation is slowly starting after the deep solar minimum. I regularly detect signals form South America, a bit of the Middle East and a a few stations from Oceania, mainly Indonesian stations. I am looking forward to be able to work stations world wide with CW (and maybe SSB) on 10m, maybe even with QRP.

2) Most days I detect signals from all over Europe, mostly at distances of more than 1200km. Soon I will have to change the monitoring to 6m and maybe 4m. 

At the same time I am trying to reduce the visual impact of my antenna system as much as possible.

Last year I had separate vertical antennas for 6m, 4m and 10m. Not very good for low visual impact. This year I am planning to test an unusual antenna for multiband use: A 10MHz ground plane antenna. This will have a low impedance resonance on 30 (workable on 28MHz with a tuner), 50 and 70MHz, with some low angle radiation. What remains to be seen is whether this will work well for 6 and 4m, if it does I will keep that as a vertical for 4 bands. With a frequency multiplexer I should be able to use the antenna simultaneously for all 4 bands. I have a diplexer separating HF and VHF, so that is a start. But before I can do this I will have to dismantle my separate 4m vertical, and that is too difficult without assistance. I hope that the COVID restrictions will ease sufficiently for that to be possible, very soon, so I do not miss too much of the Es season.

There is more antenna maintenance needed, but this has a rather high priority.

I have some ideas for making a very modest rotatable antenna system for 6/4/2m and 70/23/13/3cm. For 3cm DX I know I will need something larger, but I have to start somewhere. More on this project later.