Checking amateur radio activity in your region using PSK Reporter

Thought of checking the activity on the important amateur radio bands at 3.45 pm local time using PSK Reporter. PSK reporter has plenty of amateur radio stations globally, reporting on several modes ranging from CW, RTTY, FT8, FT4 and many others. To get the total activity I have chosen all modes in the drop down menu.

If you choose ‘country of callsign’ after typing in your callsign, you get all the reports sent and received from your country to the PSK Reporter by the various stations. A slight disadvantage is the very low number of automatic reporting stations in this region.

Started checking from 6m band which is the highest band available in my FT-710 radio, though PSK Reporter checks up to 76 GHz!

When ‘country of callsign’ is chosen, data is available only for the past 15 minutes.

On the other hand, if only ‘the callsign’ is chosen, there is option to retrieve data up to 24 hours.

There is also option to choose between ‘sent’, ‘rcvd’ and both together. For simplicity, I am choosing both. As you can see, there is no activity on 6m at the moment.

Moving to 10m, there is good bit of activity, with time and location of signals received being shown. If you hover the mouse over a report, the details of ‘sent’ and ‘rcvd’ stations, signal to noise ratio and details of the receiving setup will be shown.

Coming to 12m, there are plenty of reception reports while there are only a couple of ‘sent’ reports with time displayed. That is most likely because very few are trying the WARC band at this moment, while the ‘rcvd’ reports are from a couple of automatic stations reporting from VU. Recently I have seen more activity on 12m at night, with people working even stations from North America, which is one of the most difficult locations to reach from here.

Activity was better on 15m, but not the usual level, though there were quite a few ‘rcvd’ and ‘sent’. Remember that the CQWPX contest was going on and many operators would be on SSB mode, which is not picked up by PSK reporter.

On 17m, there were only ‘rcvd’ reports from automatic stations and no ‘sent’, again as operators are likely to be less on this WARC band.

There were only a few ‘rcvd’ reports on 20m, towards the night side of the globe and no ‘sent’ reports, which I felt could be due to SSB contest keeping people busy on that mode. The band was also not fully open at that time of the day.

30m, the remaining WARC band, had absolutely nothing to be seen.

Same situation of 40m band as well.

Nothing on 80m either.

160m band was also deserted. But activity on 160m is very little in this region even otherwise. Moreover, 80m and 160m are usually night time bands, especially near the peak of solar cycle.

Had a look at the planetary K index, to make sure that there was no geomagnetic storm going on. Everything seemed to be in the green. Apart from the fact that my propagation study could be skewed by the CQWPX contest that was going on, I have usually find this to be good way of assessing the amateur radio bands. As I have two antennas, one multiband fan dipole which covers 40, 20, 15, 10 and 6m and another 80m dipole which also covers 12m, I use the data from PSK reporter to decide on which antenna to connect.

My work was interrupted and I could continue the post only at 9 pm local time and I thought of getting more information on the propagation at that time as well. There was no new information on 80 and 160m bands. But 40m band had improved, with a few ‘rcvd’ reports.

30m which was vacant at 3.45 pm, had a few ‘rcvd’ reports at 9 pm.

Data had improved a lot on 20m, which had only a few ‘rcvd’ reports earlier. At 9 pm, there were a lot of ‘sent’ and ‘rcvd’ reports.

17m had several ‘rcvd’ reports and the number was much more than that at 3.45 pm. Being a WARC band, ‘sent’ reports were yet to appear.

15m was also remarkably better, with plenty of ‘sent’ and ‘rcvd’ reports.

12m had plenty of ‘rcvd’ reports, but no ‘sent’ reports, again, the bias for a WARC band, which seems to be less used in this region with much lower number of operators.

Though there were a lot of ‘rcvd’ reports on 10m, the ‘sent’ reports were lesser, as expected on that band at night. People may not be trying 10m at that time, thinking that propagation will be better on lower bands at 9 pm.

6m was interesting as it showed fair activity for that band at 9pm. But the hops were only in the night time zone. There could have been some transequatorial propagation as the signals had gone all the way to Australia. For our region, there is nothing there but Indian Ocean to show a transequatorial propagation straight to the South. This post will be useful to all amateur radio operators to try out bands depending on the real time activity on that particular band so that we can establish more contacts and enjoy our hobby to the maximum. 73s from VU2JO, see you on the bands.