June 2026 Club Talk: Propagation

Last night, Ian (G4ELW) took to the stage and gave a talk about propagation. This excellent talk was made even more practical by showing several different tools that are available to the radio amateur to help them understand conditions on the bands.

Ian (on the left) talking to Club members

Ian came at his talk from the point of compromised antennas - we don't all have tall towers with stacked yagi's, or antenna farms to help us; most often, we are dealing with limited space to fit our aerials into and spouses / partners who don't always follow our enthusiasm for draping wires around the garden...

However, he was keen to point that we really shouldn't lose heart about this situation and that we can still make decent contacts by understanding the opportunities that propagation offers. The talk covered VHF / UHF as well as HF bands, looking at tropospheric enhancements and sporadic-E.

Possibly Ian's favourite tool is this one... https://www.tvcomm.co.uk/g7izu/radio-propagation-maps/40-2/ as it shows real-time mapping of contacts. This also links into the VHF forecasting website of F5LEN, which provides propogation forecasting images for the days ahead.

Ian demonstrates the use of real-time mapping of contacts

The RSGB also provide a weekly propagation forecast which is very useful. This can be accessed on the RSGB website at https://rsgb.org/main/gb2rs/propagation-news/

The weekly RSGB propagation forecast on their website

Backing up the RSGB website is the Tonight@8 programs, one of which was specifically around using the HF propagation tools provided by the RSGB.

Jim Bacon, G3YLA, produces an in-depth look at Sporadic-E on his website, Propquest. This is a daily blog, using his experience as a meterologist to bring to life complicated science to the average radio ham.

For the radio operator who is more interested in HF conditions, Ian's "tool of choice" is https://soundbytes.asia/proppy/ allowing predictions to be made for point-to-point contacts. This site also provides information on potential important events... as seen below with the alert running across the top of the page.

The Proppy website can provide point-to-point forecasting

A worldwide network of beacons is also available, allowing real-time monitoring of band conditions. More information on these can be found at https://www.ncdxf.org/beacon/

Also providing real-time reports is the Solar Ham website. This reports on solar activity and provides predictions.

The Solar Ham website

We are very lucky to have all these tools available to us. Ian's talk took us through a range of these from those providing a basic overview to the more in-depth, specialist areas. So, compromised antennas should be no barrier to understanding and making the most of potential good propagation conditions!