No Es yet - Ms hits in the mean time

Sporadic E season 2020 hasn't reached into Finland yet. However, all our receivers are ready! Because there's no proper conditions to utilize, it has been a good time to gather Ms hits to the displays of our otherwise unused receivers. DXing meteors isn't easy at this corner of the world. Despite the fact that our FM dial is so open that we can use wide filters - which is a must for meteor FM RDS DX, the problem is the lack of good Ms targets on open frequencies. We have heard almost all possible stations in Ms range already via Es, tropo and Ms. To our North American readers it is worth reminding that European FM broadcasting focuses mainly on FM networks when it comes to high power stations: if you have heard one station on a one particular network there's not much sense trying to DX another transmitter on the same network anymore. If you've heard one, you've heard them all... Of course there are still some good targets on >5 kW range but they may not have that open frequencies for meteor scatter. On the other hand, DXing on good open channels usually products the same stations again and again like CR Sever on 88.8 MHz or CRo Radiozurnál on 91.1 MHz.

12th of January 2020 - Surprise opening to Italy, Southern Germany and Austria

Winter Es is here!

One might say it's very early start to the Es Season 2020 but we are not counting yet. We must patiently wait until the end of April at least. ... for the actual season to start.

There's no such thing as Winter Es Season in Finland but that said it's not unusual to have Es during winter months as well. However, it's (very) rare. We cannot speak about it as an actual season since it can be just separate Es days anytime around Winter solstice or months before or after it. Anyway, with most years there isn't Es days on FM frequencies at all during the whole winter months! This time we have been lucky since this was already the second Es day for this winter: the first one was experienced in Kasnäs two weeks ago, 28th of December.

So what we had today (well, only half of the crew was listening), it was an below average level opening to both sides of the Alps. Italy on the south side and Germany on the North. Not enough intense opening to bring up low power locals so the identified stations very basically just networks. Among better catches were 88.7 Radio Millennium and 90.7 Radio Italia Uno. But like so many times before even these were relogs.

http://www.fmlist.org/fm_logmap.php?datum=2020-01-12

25th of May 2019 - Northwest Balkans at noon, Corsica and Italy afternoon

Es continued second day in a row starting very modestly from the Black Sea area already at 08-09UTC but only some brief Russian and Turkey fade ups were noted.

From 09 UTC onwards the skip was getting more interesting when some Italian and Norhtwest Balkan stations (HRV, SVN, BIH) became audible with nice signals, many with RDS-levels. Unfortunately only lower FM-band was open, MUF staying mostly under 92 MHz. MWE was lucky to catch two personal new ones from ex-Jugoslavia: 88.1 HRT Radio Sljeme and 89.1 Radio Velika Kladusa. JKZ observed RDS-codes of the stations like 89.4 Radio Sisak, 90.0 Radio Maxi and 90.3 Zabavni Radio (ex-Radio Martin), all of which have been logged earlier. The only new one for Jouni was an Italian house music station 89.0 Party Groove, Alpignano (TO).

After 0930 UTC Es took 2½ hour nap but came back right after 12UTC. First sign was Radio Toscana PI-code on 88.0 and quickly the FM-band was full of Italian stations up to 108 MHz. This time the Es-skip reached only to the southernmost coast of Finland and even the capital city of Helsinki was missing most of the DX-action. For half an hour, Italy-opening was mostly hopeless. Noise level on every frequency was so high that RDS-codes didn't come through and only the strongest network transmitters were audible.

After 1230 UTC conditions improved a bit and started to get some direction. With the less stations audible on every frequency, also some RDS-codes started to appear. At the same time, some French-speaking stations became audible with Italians. On 104.6 MHz, JKZ noticed tropical jazz music and then some French talk. France Bleu RCFM from Corsica was listed on the frequency and Jouni had enough time to compare a program with RCFM's audio stream. And it matched!

At the time, there were already some other Corsica loggings from Finland in FMLIST's Visual log book. When checking those, JKZ noticed a peculiar music with strange language on 105.1 MHz. Station faded down but when Jouni came back to the frequency somewhat later music was there again with RDS-levels this time: PS: "  VOCE !", PI: F499. Then the signal faded down again but came back exactly at the top of the hour and Jouni was able to hear clear "Voce Nustrale" -station identification and RFI news. Later on JKZ wrote reception reports to the stations and both France Bleu RCFM 104.6 and Voce Nustrale 105.1 briefly verified Jouni's first ever reception of Corsican FM-stations!

Meanwhile MWE was forced to do some mobile FM-DXing because of domestic duties. Although DXing with mobile phone is by no means enjoyable, Marko proved that it is indeed possible. Using Global Tuners for Android app tuning our Kasnäs receivers was possible and even RDS decoding worked well as can be seen from the mobile phone screen capture below. The best mobile logging for Marko from the afternoon was probably Italian 106.3 NBC Rete Regione with audio id.

https://www.fmlist.org/fm_logmap.php?datum=2019-05-25

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

14th of May 2019 - 20 minutes of Italy

Our blog of FMDxing in Kasnäs has existed for some time already but we haven't utilized it for giving reports about Es & tropo conditions, nor have we used it for publishing details about our DX catches yet. We try to make a change for the better in the coming months, during the just started 2019 FM Es season.

Indeed, Kasnäs opened the 2019 FM Es season already on the 25th of April with two Italians but Radio Studio Delta and Radio Maria on 89.3 FM were just two fadeups, not any better. Then again on the 7th of May, there was a 50 seconds fadeup to Istanbul, Turkey which matched well with other Es observations elsewhere in Europe at the same time. Kasnäs team wasn't live DXing at the time, but 90.4 HaberTürk Radyo was received as PI 346E and PS "HT______" were found on the RDSspy log. All-time-audio-recordings from the hour didn't reveal anything else.

http://www.fmlist.org/fm_logmap.php?datum=2019-04-25
http://www.fmlist.org/fm_logmap.php?datum=2019-05-07

Today, on the 14th of May, we had slightly better starter for the season, about 20 minutes to Italy in the Pisa region. Basically nothing worth of mentioning (no new ones to either one of us), but 92.2 Radio Duemila and 98.3 PaneBurroMarmellata were logged anyway. Hope the season gets to it's full swing soon!

http://www.fmlist.org/fm_logmap.php?datum=2019-05-14

Welcome to the FM-DXing blog of Kasnäs remote listening site!

Remote controlled listening site to Kasnäs, one the southernmost peninsulas of Finland (see map on the right), was installed in the beginning of July 2016.

It was born to answer our urgent need to find more suitable location for our favorite hobby, FM-DX-listening. We (Marko MWE and Jouni JKZ) are both living in Tampere region, inland southwest Finland, where FM-band is full of local and semi-local stations in every direction. That makes it almost impossible to find free frequencies to catch far away FM-signals.

In Kasnäs the FM-band is still relatively free of strong local stations especially in the south which is the main direction when listening FMDX in Finland.

Below is the comparison of FM-band spectral scans in Kasnäs and Jouni's home QTH in Pirkkala, next to Tampere. If 35dB is the signal strenght of local FM-station where car radio's autotune stops giving full RDS-code, in Kasnäs there are 8 frequencies exceeding the 35dB level. In Pirkkala the number of frequencies is 32! Number of free frequencies, free southern horizont and the vicinity of sea makes Kasnäs almost an ideal location for FMDXing during sporadic E and tropo conditions.

Although our first summer season in Kasnäs started only in July, results for the first 3 months were more than we expected. Here are the loggings of our 2016 season from Kasnäs remote QTH:

• Es-logs July-August 2016  (PDF, partly in Finnish)
• Tropo logs August-September 2016 and very late autumn Es-logs (PDF, partly in Finnish)  

More in information about our equipment and the techinal construction of the remote controlled listening site you can read from our Equipment page.