The current spell of unsettled weather is very much in a cold phase, but although it continues to be unsettled, it will be milder and wetter in the upcoming week. Perhaps more important is that at times it will be very windy with gales in some areas. For propagation, this means that the one feature absent from the present charts is any high pressure to bring Tropo conditions.

This means the other modes take on more importance. Aurora has provided some recent interest and although there’s nothing dramatic in the immediate future, keep a watching brief for a rising Kp index, which is a good guide for impending activity if it increases beyond Kp = 5.

The rain scatter prospects are likely to be good during the coming week as several active frontal systems cross the country. Notably, Wednesday evening the 19th saw trans-North sea propagation visible on the Margate 24GHz WebSDR at URL trig01.ddns.net:8073, this extended into Thursday morning, but unfortunately, no coastal stations were around to make QSOs.

While rainscatter is a GHz band activity, on the lower bands you may find some increase in static levels due to lightning activity or even snow static in the period up to this weekend, before it turns milder.

Sporadic-E is not expected to be a strong show in the coming week since we are well out of season. Southern UK stations should continue to watch out for fleeting F-layer DX openings on 50MHz, especially to Africa and Asia

For EME operators, the Moon’s declination is at its lowest and negative all week so Moon window lengths are short and peak elevation is low. We passed apogee on the 20th, so path losses are decreasing again. 144 MHz sky noise is high at the weekend, close to 2,500 Kelvin on Saturday, but falling lower as the week progresses.