PA7MDJ Amateur Radio Blog: Whispers from Nunavut

May 02, 2017

Whispers from Nunavut

Last edited:

In the field of WSPR (a.k.a. "Whisper"), PA7MDJ mainly is a transmitting-only station, but every once in a while I also like to do a listening session, when there are special WSPR projects in progress (High Altitude Balloons, maritime mobile WSPR stations, floaters, etc.), but also just to see what my simple wire antenna is capable of, and to do my part in the efforts of the countless stations listening to create a worldwide WSPR monitoring network.

Today, while doing one of those listening sessions, on the 20m band, I caught a WSPR beacon from the Eureka Amateur Radio Club VY0ERC which is located in the Canadian Arctic at the Eureka Weather Station on Ellesmere Island, Nunavut Territory.
To be precise, VY0ERC is located about 11 km from the Eureka Weather Station at the Polar Environment Atmospheric Research Laboratory (PEARL) at the Ridge Laboratory (RidgeLab) at 80º North in grid locator ER60tb, just 1,100 km from the North Pole. At the RidgeLab observatory, situated at 600 m a.s.l. at the top of a hill, with a large complement of instrumentation, atmospheric studies can be conducted from ground level to a height of about 100 km. It's a self-contained scientific laboratory, but personell usually live at the Eureka Weather Station.

Arctic landscape at Otto Fiord, Ellesmere Island, Nunavut Territory (source)

The photos of RidgeLab and the Eureka Weather Station, as can be found on VY0ERC's qrz.com page and Twitter, showing the isolated and in ice and snow covered station buildings, are really impressive, especially for a polar enthusiast like me, and I'm really excited about the reception of the weak signal beacon from Nunavut. The signal was received with an SNR of -24 dB, and according to the received spot, at RidgeLab a power of 10 watts (40 dBm) was used.

VY0ERC also is a WSPR monitoring station, and I hope my 200 mW beacons reciprocally will be picked up on Ellesmere Island some day. It will take some better than average propagation conditions though as Polar paths never have been the easiest.