I learned something this weekend during the hurricane nate , i live in Gulfport  Ms right where the hurricane was going hit . I had made arrangements to make contact with a friend that lives about 50 miles away at 10:00 pm, the hurricane was set to hit at midnight.  We make contact all the time on 80 and 40 meters NVIS , well we tried 80 and 40 and could not hear each other at all next morning 9:00 am made contact as usual 10 over signal like always. so it looks like the hurricane affects the ionsphere.

Hurricane doesn't affect the ionosphere, doesn't mean there might not be a disturbance to the ionosphere at the same time though.

What it does do, is increase your local noise level so that it's a lot harder to hear.

At 50 miles, it's very possible that much of your signal was not in fact "NVIS" but just a direct tropospheric path, and the increase in noise and attenuation would probably be significant.

People were making fun of the extreme VHF contest station in the other thread, but with relatively simple 2m SSB stations that 50 mile path would be trivial 24/7/365 regardless of the ionosphere, and probably during a hurricane too.

This is of interest.  To clarify, are you saying that the hurricane increases stray RF that is then picked up by your receiver, or do you mean actual audible noise that you hear with your ears?  Does the storm itself cause attenuation of an RF signal?  Thanks.

40 and 80M does not automatically confer you with double top secret NVIS status.

For example, look at the FoF2 map right now (well, when I posted this )

Attached File


If you were trying to make contact with your buddy as of the date/time of this post, 40M would be over FoF2 and there's no way the propagation mode would be NVIS. Similarly, FoF2 is further than 1MHz above the 80M band, so again, no NVIS. However, 60M might have indeed exhibited the right conditions for NVIS propagation.

You need to check the FoF2 conditions here to see what's what at any given time of day or night. My bet is that FoF2 was well below 80M at 10PM or so when you were operating.

Atmospheric noise, likely caused by a lot of lightning associated with the hurricane.

It was strange , i was using my 80 meter horizontal loop that i had lowered to about 20 ft. I was able to take down all my other antenna's, the loop was actually pretty quiet that close to the ground but i was still picking up some good static crashes.

Thanks.   I learned something.