Page 002Band conditionsŠiauliai
Winter nights on the low bands above the Šiauliai plain
From the middle of October until the beginning of March the useful part of the day here runs from about four in the afternoon until whenever I give up. These are the notes from four winters of sitting up with the low bands and a squared notebook.
- Date
- 17 November 2024
- UTC
- 1041
- Band
- 15 m
- Mode
- CW
- Typed up
- 9 February 2025
- Reading
- 8 min
October: the dark comes before the band does
Darkness arrives in October well before the low bands become reliable, which caught me out entirely in the first year. Sunset moves back quickly through the month, and by the end of it the light has gone before five, yet eighty metres in mid-October still carries the summer's static, the thunderstorm noise arriving from a long way south, and the band does not settle until the weather across the continent settles. Some years that is the last week of October. In 2023 it was nearly the twentieth of November.
What does improve early is the middle of the evening on forty metres. Through October the band holds open eastwards until nine or ten rather than closing at eight, and signals arriving from that side are steadier than they were in September. The pattern is regular enough to plan an evening around. I start listening at half past four, write the hour in the margin, and note which direction is loudest every half hour until I stop.
The hour after sunset, the hour before dawn
Two windows in any winter night are worth more than the whole of the rest of it. The first is the hour or so after local sunset, when the absorbing layer has faded here but the path towards the east is still lit. The second is the hour before dawn, harder to be awake for and better in almost every respect: quieter, steadier, and with long paths open that never appear in the evening. Most of the contacts I still remember sit inside one of those two windows.
Sunset here travels from about half past four at midwinter to nearly seven by the beginning of March, and dawn moves roughly in step, so both windows drift through the season. Writing the two times at the head of each night's page takes a few seconds and made five winters of notes comparable with one another. Without it, a note saying the band was good at seven means nothing at all, because seven in December and seven in March are different parts of the night.
Noted in the margin
- Write local sunset and sunrise at the top of each night's page
- The post-sunset window runs sixty to ninety minutes
- The pre-dawn window is quieter, steadier, worth the alarm clock
- Record which direction is loudest, not merely that the band is open
Noise in a town of flat roofs and farm yards
One-sixty metres is where the local noise lives, and a small town on a plain makes a great deal of it. From this garden the noise floor climbs sharply at dusk and falls again after about eleven at night, which for a long time I took to be something the band was doing. It was the street, of course. Switching supplies, an electric fence two fields out that pulses roughly once a second, and something in a neighbouring yard that starts in November and stops in March.
Finding these is slow work and worth doing before spending money on anything else. A portable receiver carried round the block on a cold evening located the fence in about twenty minutes, and the seasonal one turned out to be a heater that only gets used below about minus five. None of it is mine to switch off. Knowing the hours each one keeps means I can read my own log properly and stop writing down a quiet band as a bad one.
Keeping a listening log worth rereading
A log that records only contacts throws away most of what a winter has to teach. Mine has a line for every half hour I am in the chair, whether anything came of it or not: the time in UTC, the band, what the noise sounded like in plain words, the strongest direction, and the weather outside the window. Four winters of those lines is the only reason I can say anything about October with a straight face.
Rereading is the part everyone skips, myself included for the first two years. Each February I go back through the season and copy the pattern onto a single sheet: when each band opened, when it closed, which nights were disturbed and which were merely dull. It takes an afternoon. What comes out is a rough calendar for the following winter, and every year that calendar is a little less wrong than the last one.