For the first time in a while I had a relatively free Sunday so I took advantage of this by jumping on HF and exploring the state of HF propagation on the higher frequency bands (10m through 20m) using my Xiegu G90 (running 10w output) into a simple quarter-wave vertical antenna in the form of a telescopic whip. This is easily adapted for any of the 20/17/15/12/10m bands by changing the physical length of the antenna.
After some hours of operating and having found a sweet-spot in the 15m band, I used the internal antenna tuner in the G90 to tune the antenna (which I had set to 15m resonance) on the 17m and 12m bands with good results.
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| Log extract showing contacts on 17/15 & 12m bands |
I checked with the HF Propagation website https://hf.dxview.org/ to see what I might expect and I used PSKReporter spots to visualise the extent of my transmitted signal. It was evident on the waterfall for all bands (I was using the JTDX software) that there was a high degree of variability (fading) in received signal strengths from all areas but it was particularly interesting to see just how closely the PSKReporter spots for my transmitted signal aligned with the predicted propagation on the various bands.
Best DX to the west was W7CT in the state of Utah at approximately 5000 miles, to the east I had a contacts with UF8C in Krasnoturinsk and R9MJ in Omsk, both in Asiatic Russia, at approximately 2300 and 2900 miles distant respectively. All three of these contacts were on the 15m band.
These are screenshots I took from PSKReporter showing spots of my transmitted signal:
 | | PSKReporter 12m spots |
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 | | PSKReporter 15m spots |
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 | | PSKReporter 17m spots |
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 | | PSKReporter 20m spots |
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I have omitted 10m spots as I only made a single contact on that band and quickly moved onto the other bands.
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