24th of May 2019 - 3 hours of Italy, France, Switzerland etc.

While waiting for the first Es stations to appear after an alert from elsewhere, it all started up with some tropo regulars like 88.8 XXL FM and 100.9 LRT Radijas from the Bubiai transmitter site, Lithuania (455km). The first Es fadeups were noted around 0713 UTC in Kasnäs. The conditions strengthened ten minutes later and the first stations were identified. The starter period of the Es opening was to the France/Switzerland/Germany border region.

By 08 UTC all had gone but for the next half an hour, there were still some fadeups. Probably the most interesting station caught during the whole day was Rádio Česká Kanada from Jindřichův Hradec, Czech Republic as it was heard for the first time in Finland. It was found from our unattended recordings and RDS Spy log but unfortunately there were no station ID, just talk.

Strong Italy opening for more than one hour in length started around 09 UTC. In the beginning, we had plenty of stations from Rome but we should have paid more attention to pulling in stations still missing from us. As more or less, the heard stations were already familiar to us. Well, except this one: JKZ had good luck and pulled in 92.9 Spazio Radio, a station playing jazz music. Their slogan is "Onda Jazz". It happens to be operating on this one and only frequency, so it's a real local radio station, "a gem" for DXers.

Another station worth of mentioning from JKZ's catches today is Radio Marilù. It's a regional network playing rock music. PaneBurroMarmellata was also heard again, this time on 104.4 MHz (audio below).

Italy has so many FM networks on air these days so it's sometimes very difficult to catch anything better (if you try too much). Today's opening was very productive from a single fixed freqency point of view. Sometimes it's just better to leave frequency untouched for a longer time than live-DX... But of course, we could have had even better results with SDRs...

http://www.fmlist.org/fm_logmap.php?datum=2019-05-24