Letter beacons as a quck propagation check.

On the Bands
1

Hi folks, I am pretty sure most of you are familiar with those beacons, for those who are not, here is a Wiki article about them https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_beacon
I am finding those beacons as fairly useful for checking current propagation by band, an antenna efficiency etc. It looks like the beacons are located in Russia, but it seems to be ok for a quick general condx assessment at a given moment…

10871.8 for 10MHz
13527.8 for 14MHz
16331.8 for 18MHz
20047.8 for 21MHz

There are several beacons working on a single freq, so set you CW filter wide to receive all of them simultaneously.

What do you think?

73 de EI4JY, Alex

2 Likes
2

Hi Alex,

why not use the NCDX beacons?
https://www.ncdxf.org/beacon/beaconSchedule.html

73 Martin
OE5REO

2 Likes
3

Ah, cheers Martin! Completely forgot about ham radio beacons :slight_smile:
Although, normally struggling to copy them with my indoor antenna anyway.