Whatever's happened to 40m?

摘要

Having just recently retired, I decided to resuscitate my amateur radio interests by moving my old Kenwood TS-120V from the loft to the study, which is a more convivial place to be from all points of view. This manoeuvre required some clandestine re-routing of the coax from the ATU in the loft that is connected by 300Ω feed-line to a nondescript inverted-V hanging off the chimney. Once I'd ascertained that the sounds of SSB and CW issuing from the speaker were well enough received by she who calls the shots around here, I proceeded to re-acquaint myself with the 40m band. That's when I remembered that the sunspot count was in rapid decline and, consequently, so were the band conditions on HF.