Ionosphere conditions seem to follow a predicted tendency to reach a maximum in 2012/2013, so we may experience a long lasting DX openings and maybe blackouts :/ too.

This situation is obvious from the diagrams at NOAA Space center:

http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/SolarCycle/

http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/SWN/index.html

Signals often travel in mysterious ways, so we can reach Australia and Austria stations simultaneously from central Europe. It seems to be an effect of ionosphere reflections both low angle and Es and maybe some direction dependent reflections or scatterings as can be sometimes seen on ionograms, directograms and spectrograms.

Ionogram from station Pruhonice shows such a suspect reflections from E – NNE direction upto 9MHz f0F2 (light blue area).

Interesting effects can be seen on weak narrow bandwidth signals as WSPR are.

Below is the main window of WSPR codec in receive mode. Here you can see a repeating pattern of a fuzzy signal of unidentified transmitting wspr beacon because its frequency drifts too much. The cause of this drift is probably due to some ionospheric effect and Doppler shift [?]. Note the local time and the frequency!

Let’s see how beautiful show the mother nature is preparing for us in the next years..