By Courtesy of the Propagation team
G3YLA JIM
G0KYA STEVE
G4BAO JOHN
Its all about the weather
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Jim Bacon G3YLA
NARC club member
and Nick Henwood
RSGB President.
Propogation News
24th July 2026
HF
3
We said last week that there were no coronal holes to worry about. Yet two days later a massive crack appeared on the Sun, stretching over one million kilometers.
Luckily, this didn’t amount to much and it had little effect on HF propagation, but it does go to show that solar events can rapidly develop and that long-term forecasts can be tricky.
The solar flux index has increased over the past week, sitting at 150 at the time of writing. As we suggested earlier, geomagnetic conditions have been quiet with the Kp index generally below 3.5, which bodes well for HF.
Solar conditions have been good with only four M-class solar flares and no X-class events. Any CMEs have been directed away from Earth.
We are still in the Summer doldrums so D-layer absorption remains high and MUFs are generally lower than in Autumn and Winter. However, we have the IOTA contest this weekend, which is a great opportunity to work some far-flung DX so why not dust off your radio and get on the air? With mainland Great Britain being an island you might find you are in demand as EU-005!
Other DX to be worked this week includes RI0BW, the Arctic Legends IOTA DXpedition (Vize Island, AS-055), 3B9HR (Rodrigues Island), PJ7/LA5IIA (St Maarten), TY5FR (Benin), E51CZZ and E51KEE (Cook Islands), VU4R (Andaman Islands) and VP5G (Turks & Caicos).
Next week, NOAA predicts that the SFI may fall back to 125 at first, and then down to around 108. Luckily, the Kp index is predicted to remain low, with a predicted Kp of two, at least until the end of the month.
VHF and up
There have been good examples of both Tropo and Sporadic-E in the last week and there are reasons to continue with some optimism for the coming week.
This is still a good season for summer Tropo, but do remember that hot days are the enemy of Tropo over land and it tends to be sea paths that survive throughout the day, whereas the land stations have to make the best of night time operations.
That said, the main change in the weather pattern this coming week will be that the high pressure, which has been over the Atlantic just west of Britain shifts into the continent and eventually out of reach by the end of next week.
So, the message is to get into the Tropo while it’s here, and use the latter part of the week for perhaps meteor scatter, with the Delta Aquarids peaking early next week. Reserved optimism for this since it’s primarily a southern hemisphere event.
Rain scatter has been very hard to find recently, but looks like making a comeback as the weather turns more unsettled with sequences of fronts crossing the country. Maybe only patchy from weak fronts, but worth considering.
The summer aurora prospects are staying on the marginal side, but watch out for Kp index values creeping above Kp=5 before turning the beams north.
Sporadic-E is rolling along in main summer season fashion and has been very good lately and currently producing a full set of bands up to 2m this morning (Thurs) as I write this.
As the weather turns a bit more unsettled, this could help with Es as the fronts move into the continent and weak jet streams and possibly thundery cold fronts create a bit more turbulence at the right sort of range over Europe, probably favouring paths to Scandinavia round to the Balkans.
For EME operators, Moon declination reaches minimum on Sunday 26th so Moon window lengths and peak Moon elevation are at their lowest value. With apogee on Saturday 25th path losses will decrease as next week progresses. 144 MHz sky noise is high to start the week peaking at over 2800 Kelvin on Sunday before slowly decreasing in the upcoming week.
G3YLA JIM
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G0KYA STEVE
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