Season Preps And a New Feature On My Blog: The KONG And Smøla Yaslogs!

 Another beautiful and dry morning at the KONG HQ, the photo below was taken at 06 local. DX here is totally dead due to the high solar activity with X flares and an ongoing proton event.

Yesterday afternoon was spent removing ground rods from a previous antenna installation for later use. Hard work, but as Billy Ocean once sang: When The Going Gets Tough, The Tough Get Going....!

Collected ground rods (among tools and other antenna related things)

A new feature on this blog is Yaslogs! These are a vital a part of a MW DX-ers' daily routine - that is, for Perseus/Jaguar users. A short look of the Yaslog is enough to see if it's worthwhile to check recordings or not. They also provide an interesting illustration into how signals are affected by geomagnetic activity. For those not familiar with this feature, below is an illustration of what it does and what we can see.

Today's Yaslog (including 4 hours from yesterday) on the 50-degrees beverage

The Yaslog we see on our PCs is updated every minute, while the net version is updated every hour.

Now obviously, the Yaslog has its limitations. A DX-er in North America will not be able to track interesting openings inside his/her continent since signal levels will be high most of the time anyway. Same goes for us in Europe if we want to chase specific Asian and Pacific signals such as New Zealand. But it makes it super easy to see if transcontinental signals are present. And the effects of geomagnetic disturbances are extremely easy to spot - and often provide an opportunity for excellent DX in itself.

Naturally, the Yaslog only gives us the broad picture. To detect the really interesting signals, we focus on the carriers of each frequency. But when I checked the 10-er frequencies on our 310-degrees beverage this morning, I know for sure that I don't have to check my recordings. By the way the rather strong signals on some frequencies are where the American and European/Asian frequencies "meet", such as 900, 990, 1080, 1170 etc.

"Nothing to see here folks, move on!"

The links to the Yaslogs are on the right-hand section of the blog:

At the time of writing, the KONG-340 Yaslog is empty - the antenna is not up yet and the Perseus is not running.

So, why make these Yaslogs available? Well, I know for sure that some DX-ers use the URLs as browser favourites for their own info, especially if they don't use the Perseus/Jaguar combo themselves. So, they may be of use for some. The links would probably not be active from mid-April until late August when the antennas are down.

KONG48 (the short version) is held the coming weekend with Ole and OJS arriving Thursday and Friday to set up gear, work with antennas (including the 340), enjoy a bit of food and drinks before leaving Monday morning. And would you believe it - it's going to rain!