The unsettled weather pattern continues to provide a variety of challenging weather types with heavy snow and rain, plus strong winds at times.

The nature of such patterns in January is that the timing and track of the lows are critical for the rain/snow outcome. Overall, it’s likely to be a cold-system week with occasional brief milder interludes as Atlantic fronts move through in the middle of next week.  

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The effect on VHF/UHF propagation is limited with Tropo unlikely, but there is a significant chance of rain/snow scatter at times for the GHz operators.

There have been some slight increases in the Earth’s Kp index. which responds to solar activity, but as we a re between the peak periods of autumn and spring for aurora, it’s probably not a major player this time.

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Meteor scatter has been a bit more interesting lately due to the peak of the Quadrantids meteor shower on January 4th. The shower has a short, intense peak, but spans across the period December 28th to January 12th, so it is just coming to an end this weekend.

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The next major shower isn’t until April, so it’s back to random activity from this weekend through to the late April Lyrids.

Lastly, a reminder that mid-winter Sporadic-E does happen and the 6th saw a nice early evening 6m opening to the Baltic states, moving round to Ukraine and the Balkans later.

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Recent Quadrantids meteors may have contributed some long-lived metallic ions, which can be focused into thin Es patches. It’s always worth checking the foEs (or Es Layer Critical Frequency) values plotted on the Propquest graphs for short spikes in the purple trace, which could be a sign of potential interest in Es on 10m and 6m.

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For EME operators, Moon declination is negative again and we are past perigee, so path losses are increasing and Moon window length and peak elevation are reducing. 144 MHz sky noise remains low, but rising to high by next Friday 16th.

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