Saturday Net on 7230 kHz

The signal reports among participants in the Saturday, 26 Dec 2009 net confirmed the continuing lack of propagation at distances of less than about 250 miles. Without a map in front of me that shows the locations of participants, it is hard to visualize the relative distances and directions among stations. Below is a map view showing the participants' locations and a dark shaded area representing the approximate zone of "no copy" (aka donut hole) relative to Birmingham. Click on the image to magnify.

To represent the ability of various stations to hear each other I produced another view with color-coded lines between many (but not all) pairs of stations. Red signifies good copy and blue signifies poor or no copy. In general, stations that are at least 250 miles apart were able to copy each other, although this distance threshold seemed to be growing as time progressed beyond the 0900 CST start of the net. W4BXI reported poor copy of K9JWJ although they are 307 miles apart. I used purple to mark that path.

Hopefully, this picture will improve as sunspot cycle 24 gets going!