60m Propagation Experiment

Back in May 2016 as I’m sure most people know a very aggressive wildfire over ran the city of Fort McMurray Alberta. My long time friend and Elmer Al Parson’s VE6RFM was the acting Emergency Co-coordinator for the Fort McMurray Amateur Radio Club ARES group when the fire was going on and he spent several days working in the Emergency Operations Centre for the Municipal District of Wood Buffalo. Fortunately, they never lost communications out of the community during the fire and Amateur Radio wasn’t needed to provide back up communications.

Al contacted me shortly after he was stood down from the EOC about an idea he had.

A little background, in 2014 Industry Canada granted 5 channels in the 60m (5 mHz) Radio band for Amateur Radio operators to use. This band has been used in commercial and military service for years, but not much hard data on how well it it worked for short range NVIS propagation (50-600km) at 100w or less power.  There was also was not any data on the effect of Aurora has on 60m propagation.

Al’s idea was to test the viability of 60m for Emergency Communications in Alberta.

After many discussions as to how we could quantify the viability, we arrived on beaconing using the Olivia digital mode in FLDIGI at set intervals then using PSK Reporter  to collect the reception reports.

Matthew VE6JI joined the project and wrote a scheduler for Windows that would ensure that the beacons were sent at the correct time. His scheduler can be found here. I  wrote a perl based scheduler that is still in alpha testing that will hopefully also do message decode confidence once it’s complete.

We’ve purposely set to beacon radios to less then 50w reduce the chance of causing interference to other users of the frequency.

For more information on this project and access to the data that has so far been collected please go to auroralpower.ca