HF Is getting harder

I've been a slack HAM. 

I blame the neighbours... and they don't even know it. My ability to receive anything on HF has become worse over the past few months.

I live in modern suburbia - houses all so close together that you can jump from one roof to the next. A couple of neighbours have recently installed solar panels. Looking through my last years worth of SSTV images (mostly on 40m), I can see where the fall off starts. 

I'm also to blame; late last year I realised that the solar on the back shed was struggling to bring the batteries back to full due to the overnight load. The angle of the panels isn't great, so it's not as efficient as it could be  (and I'd need to re-engineer the roof), and the load on them has grown since I hooked in the greenhouse. I ran mains power down there primarily to run  a battery charger overnight. It'd start around 10pm and run till 5am, but would only push 2A. Not actually enough to charge the batteries, but almost enough to deal with the overnight load on that circuit. It's helped ensure that the batteries reach full charge again during the day, but it's basically wiped out HF overnight. 

 

I have ordered a new battery charger - a Victron model, as a bit of research suggests that they're pretty quiet. It'll also run at 6A. That's by no means near enough to charge 340AH worth of batteries, but it's more than enough to carry the load overnight and still recover some of the capacity.  It also means that I can run it significantly later when I'm less likely to be receiving images. 

On the other side of this, I'm working on getting solar on the house. I don't have the financial luxury of getting too carried away; it'll be what it will be if it happens. Daytime HF is already bloody challenging. The interest rates are murder; though I'm glad we built when we did. I'd hate to be paying a mortgage on what the council rates tell us the property is worth at the moment. 

We use a lot of power. I very much doubt we'll ever feed any power back into the grid; we simply use too much of it. I'd be happy to be wrong - I'd like to add a battery at some point in the future - simply because that would allow us blackout protection. The feed in tariffs are a joke, and looking at the providers who offer better tariffs, they're also charging significantly more per kWH for their power, so without adequate real world data to analyse, it's hard to determine if it's really of value at this stage.

We'd be limited to 5kWH export on a 10kWH system, and given that we're a north facing, narrow house that will have panels split between east and west, we're unlikely to ever even get close to that limit. 

The vertical I use mainly for FT8 I suspect will need to move. It's likely to slightly shade the west facing solar panels. It's on a near 50m run of LMR400 to the back shed, so there's probably no great loss in moving the thing, though it won't be without its challenges.  The XYL might also have some issues with this, given that a relocation would put it somewhere that she can see it.

So really - it's challenging right now to be inspired to play with HF. Even on FT8, I'm lucky to get anything in the log - though I do at least appear to be getting heard reasonably well.  Hopefully at least I can make small gains to improve things in the evenings.

In the mean time, our barren backyard has sprouted gardens in various states of being planted, a greenhouse with all manner of automations.. and we're still chasing rats. Again. The never ending development works around us seems to get them active, and it's an ongoing battle to keep up with the required amount of bait, trying to block off where they're getting under the fences and so on.