Station log · Šiauliai

One station, thirty-one metres of garden, and a notebook that does the remembering.

A station notebook from northern Lithuania: wire antennas in a small garden, HF band conditions through the seasons, and long winter listening nights.

Station: Šiauliai, Lithuania
Ground: Šiauliai County, flat to the horizon
Keeping the log since: 2020
Pages here: 5

What the bands do from here

Six years of half-hourly lines, flattened into one picture. The left bar is daylight, the right bar is darkness; both are my own garden and nobody else's.

160 m1.8104% day · 58% nightWinter only, and only once the street has gone to bed.
80 m3.65013% day · 86% nightThe dependable one from October through to March.
40 m7.09041% day · 92% nightOpen somewhere in almost every hour of the year.
30 m10.12056% day · 68% nightNarrow, quiet, and steadier than it has any right to be.
20 m14.18088% day · 34% nightThe daylight workhorse. Shuts early in midwinter.
17 m18.13073% day · 17% nightFollows twenty by about an hour at both ends.
15 m21.25064% day · 7% nightGood years only, and gone by mid-afternoon.
10 m28.48046% day · 3% nightRemarkable when it works. Nothing at all when it does not.

Recent pages

Written at the desk on the date shown and typed up afterwards, with the band and the hour exactly as they stand in the paper book.

0050149 UTC10 mCWOperating

A contest weekend spent listening more than calling

Two days of a busy contest weekend used as an antenna test rather than a score: how it was planned, and what the notebook got out of it.

Logged 13 Jun 2026Typed up 25 Aug 20266 min

0041112 UTC160 mCWPropagation

Reading the solar numbers without pretending to be a physicist

Sunspot number, solar flux and the K index explained the way a newcomer needs them: what each one changes on the bands this evening.

Logged 24 Nov 2025Typed up 11 Mar 20267 min

0031605 UTC40 mSSBHomebrew

A tin box, a ferrite ring, and the noise that went away

Three winter evenings spent making a common-mode choke and a dummy load from scrap: what changed on the receiver, and what did not.

Logged 5 May 2025Typed up 30 Jul 20256 min

0021041 UTC15 mCWBand conditions

Winter nights on the low bands above the Šiauliai plain

What eighty and one-sixty metres really do here between October and March, hour by hour, from four winters of notes kept beside the radio.

Logged 17 Nov 2024Typed up 9 Feb 20258 min

0010733 UTC17 mLISTENAntennas

Forty metres of wire in a garden thirty metres long

How a full-size forty-metre wire goes up in a garden nine metres too short: where it bends, what the feed point does, and how it behaves.

Logged 21 Apr 2024Typed up 12 Aug 20247 min

Pinned above the desk

Four lines that took five winters

I keep one modest station on the edge of Šiauliai, put up wire antennas that only just fit, and write down what the high-frequency bands actually do over this flat country, season after season.

Log the hour in UTC, or the notes compare with nothing.
Listen for an evening before transmitting for a minute.
Fix the noise at home before blaming the ionosphere.
A contest tests the antenna. The score is not the point.