Finnish TV seen in Southern Estonia with an indoor antenna

On Sunday and Monday, a strong tropospheric ducting hit our area... flooding the airwaves with foreign television stations. In Finland, and in Estonia, reports are coming out about problems with signals because of co-channel interference. I had also issues, but because I live northwest of the transmitter serving my area, and as such I was able to place antennas in a way that the local signal would win the battle.

It all began on Sunday morning when the sky dawned and I noticed the weather was clear. EMHI had been forecasting a high pressure area to set in and colder weather to arrive. As I remember many good DXes from the winter high pressure areas, I decided to attempt to pick up neighboring digital transmitters. Koeru from 93 km away, yes! Eventually got Tallinn too. But as the day progressed, I lost their signal again, but not to the bad propagation. Rather I lost it to the good propagation as Finnish signals on the same frequencies(E57 for Koeru, E45 for Tallinn) kicked in. In the noon hours, I was able to lock to Lahti's E51 as well. Then, E46 and E32 came in from Espoo. I was able to save those channels as well to my set top box and managed to get a stuttering picture of YLE's channels and some private channels. Eventually they faded out. However, as the afternoon progressed, I kept scanning the channels and seeing most of the UHF band being overcrowded by digital signals. Then, I saw Lahti. By this time, local television signals from E47 in Valgjärve were dark - only way to get them was to put antenna to another place. By quarter to two PM, I saw E51 from Lahti with signal strength 88% and quality of 90%... Would you believe that I received this with an indoor antenna? Espoo was also coming in. By 2 PM, E51 had weakened and I was scanning channels again. Now I ended up on E53 from Espoo. Signal strength 62%, quality 15%. Sound stuttered. It was about 15 minutes before 3 PM, when I got signal from Tammela. This was E50, and channels list pointed to "kanavanippu C", which is transmitted from Tammela in this frequency. At 3 PM, I noticed strong signal coming on E33. I initially thought it was Multiplex 1 from Kohtla-Nõmme. Think again... If I ran channel search, I initially thought that the receiver had locked to E32. But it was E33. I was receiving Kanavanippu A from Lahti despite Estonian digital transmitter on the same frequency. Still with an indoor antenna, signal strength was 86%, quality 84%.

E33 at 3:10 PM.

By 4 PM, all Finnish multiplexes went dark while still indicating a presence of digital signal. Occasionally some signals from various places jumped in for short time. The hotspot for the evening was Tammela...

On the next morning
Hmm... it appears that it is over... or is it? I scan the band... and I find a strong signal originating on E38. Channels list on that frequency and other freqs with similar strength and their channel lists indicate Mikkeli. Wow. That is the furthest digital signal from Finland I have ever received. My previous record was from E51 in Lahti. By using a directional logarythmic antenna(which could block co-channel interference a bit), I was able to pick up E43 from Mikkeli too... and saw even the "lost sheep" MTV3 and Nelonen. Occasionally the Mikkeli signal, especially the multiplex was very strong... Finnish DX came to an end after 9 AM in the morning.
However, before it happened, I was able to save this signal strength report to the posterity:

The opening continued to gradually weaken throughout the day, with only Koeru's transmitter remaining above normal signal level. In fact, it is above normal even now as I type. Signal strength 64%, quality 58%. Usually all I'd get would be 50%/0-5% with even no teletext!

On analog
I was also able to DX some analog signals. I was able to pick up one station in St. Petersburg, Russia. I do not know its exact name right now, but the logo in their ident read 5 PETERBURG.

Wow! This is definitely one memorable DX experience that will not be forgotten for a long time.

How far(approximate values)?
Laguja-Koeru - 95 km
Laguja-Tallinn - 170 km
Laguja-Espoo - 250 km
Laguja-Lahti - 320 km
Laguja-Mikkeli - 385 km
Laguja-Tammela - 340 km

I apologise for any typographical errors in this posting. I do not have the time right now to do a full spell check.

"We interrupt this program..."

War of the Worlds, the infamous radio play based on the book by H. G. Wells, turned 70. When it initially aired, people in the U.S had the daylights scared out from themselves. Obviously there was also outrage over this radio play, as has been for other such "newscasts." Remember Without Warning on TV in 1994? Yes, people got scared and outraged. Bye Bye Belgium in 2006? Yep. You know the answer. Same reaction. Sometimes I tend to think that even now 70 years later, people blindly trust whatever they hear on the television, radio etc and are simply unable to make a distinction between fact and fiction. Honestly, I personally find faux newscasts to be quite entertaining. So what would I do if I happened to tune into a faux newscast and I am unaware that it is fake. I have three simple rules for that.
1. Switch to another channel, preferrably a news one - if there are really Martian cylinders falling from the sky, then it is obvious that all news channels from CNN to Al Jazeera would have their staff up and in arms, covering the story. If noone else is talking about that, and other channels do not mention it even in their teletexts(especially if they are in the "affected" area)... something is fishy.
2. Run a Google News search on the event "covered." The news must have started somewhere from a smaller source, and once again, read rule no. 1 - you ought to find other news sources confirming it if it really was real. Although caveat: If you find another news service reporting the event, look who they claim as a source. Maybe they have believed the faux newscast.
3. If you have been unable to verify that the event is really happening in real life, then sit back in your couch, and enjoy the entertainment and imagine as if you were in an action movie.

Going up? Or going down?

Now, at the time, when people are keeping their eyes on every stock index from Nikkei to Dow Jones, I thought I'd write about a way of keeping track on my emotions... Tension lack index. I got inspiration for this initially in 2004 when hearing about stock prices rising/falling/being steady from the news. I started daily calculations of it on 30 October 2005 at 15:15 with initial value of 100 points. I am raising it a certain level of percents(4-20, depending on the strength of emotions) when I have a positive emotion, and lower when I have a negative emotion. Using a preprogrammed calculator, doing this is easy. Daily at or near 19:00 UTC, I write this value down. As a result I have an insight how well or not well I have been doing. Now, today, I added a feature this blog which enables to show the latest write-down with the recorded change during the previous day.

Ike

My condolences go out to all people who suffered under hurricane Ike, or under the remnants of it.

Following scripts portray the imaginary(and fictional!) media I have written about before during these days. This pretty much should sum up what thoughts I had about this storm in my head. This time I have written into some new characters, LWTV, a weather related English language channel, and LWS, a local (but also fictional weather service). If you want to read more about ex-Ike's effects on Iceland, I'd suggest to read Iceland Review.
LRET 1: 15:30 on 18.09.2008
Ident: SPECIAL REPORT: Ex-Ike
Anchor: Good afternoon, although the main news just concluded, this is once again a special report of LRET 1 News on the remnants of Ike. We would like to remind that continuous coverage on ex-Ike can be seen on LRET 5. Just less than a half an hour ago, Iceland Review released another report on the remnants of Ike. There have been reports of flooding and damage to the roads. It has been told that this was probably the worst storm in years. We shall now switch over to our sister station LWTV, which has been on the air monitoring Ike since last Friday. Let's listen in now..."
LWTV Meteorologist 4: "Honestly, these reports are even worse than I expected. I expected a strong storm with gusts at low hurricane force, but..."
LWTV Meteorologist 3: "Meanwhile, let's say hello to viewers of LRET 1, who will be following us for next few minutes. We here at the LWTV studios in LWS have been on the air continuously, with the exception of weather updates and hourly newscasts, since Friday noon. Now, let's bring out some important reports. Recently a report emerged from Iceland that airstrip in Gjögur had reported wind speed of 47 meters per second last night, per Iceland Review. We were unable to determine whether this was a sustained reading or a gust. For our international viewers's here's a little conversion. 47 meters per second is 169 kilometers per hour, 91 knots or 105 miles per hour. This is the last we have heard from out there."
LWTV Meteorologist 5(leaves roundtable and walks to a video screen): "All right, I'd like to put this reading into perspective. Can we get Saffir Simpson scale to the video screen?"
Hurricane scale appears on the video screen
LWTV Meteorologist 5: "OK. I would first like to put a little caveat on this - Saffir Simpson hurricane scale is used for tropical cyclones in the Atlantic Ocean. Ike is no longer a tropical cyclone... and there is chance that it might not even be an ex-Ike anymore by standard means, but possibly the moisture from ex-Ike as a part of another cyclone."
LWTV Meteorologist 4: "Don't forget ex-Lowell that joined ex-Ike!"
LWTV Meteorologist 5: "And moisture from ex-Lowell. Of course, merger with another system will certainly remove identity from the weather maps, but the bad weather itself... Depends. Sometimes the weather conditions doesn't make it through the merger either, but sometimes they might provide extra fuel to the resultant system. Anyway, we have a report from Iceland about winds reaching 47 meters per second. I assume that this was a gust. Now, if this was a tropical cyclone and 47 meters per second was a 1 minute average speed, this would mean a strong Category 2 hurricane. If I remember such wind speed is kind of close to the intensity Ike had at making landfall in Texas. Does anyone have the Texas landfall intensity?"
LWTV Meteorologist 2: "Hang on, I'll check... 49! 49 meters per second, but that was sustained. Gusts were obviously higher."
LWTV Meteorologist 3: "By the way, has Europe even had storm with winds even gusting more than that?"
LWTV Meteorologist 5: "In fact we have. A storm which Germans called Anatol in 1999 had gusts to 48 meters per second. (fact sheet about European storms appears on video screen) Now, of course, in the mountains, much higher above the ground, it can be much windier, but during Kyrill in 2007, winds reached 62 meters per second! I however think this was measured at a pretty high elevation. Also the gusts in The Great Storm of 1987 in the UK were slightly stronger than our today's reason of attention."
LRET 1 Anchor: "Ok, we are breaking away now from LWTV to pass over to our weather studio for the latest comment."
Weather announcer at LRET 1: "Yes, and indeed, we are having a some sort of an identity crisis. Apparently Ex-Ike with the moisture from Ex-Lowell may have lost its identity early this week. Regardless of it, the... even if merged... remnants have probably acted like a high octane fuel, and intensified an extratropical low pressure area to the intensity that is probably even comparable to beasts like Anatol and Erwin. Latter one is also known as Gudrun and that name is also probably familiar for residents in Pärnu and other coastal areas... and also people at far inland. However, folks in that city, don't grab that sand bag! This system is already weakening and in addition, a high pressure area in our neck of the woods, which we here have been aptly calling "The Ex-Hurricane Levee" after it blocked ex-Hanna, will block off ex-Ike either..."

LWTV 20:53 on 19.09.2008
LWTV Meteorologist 12: "And this was the summary of this hurricane and its afterlife. All right, we all have now gathered here to finally end this, for us, record-breaking broadcast. We have been on the air, practically continuously in Estonian on ILTV and English on LWTV, for 7 days, 8 hours and 50 minutes, minus the newscasts and weather updates in every 10 minutes. We have been also simulcasted on Ilm FM in Estonian and on Weather AM in English, and we have been passing notes to each other all the time through the departments at the LWS."
LWTV Meteorologist 9: "Indeed, we decided to stay on the air continuously even after Ike became a tropical depression after it became evident that Europe might need to track this system, and after we almost lost the track of the storm. For about 24 hour time period, locating ex-Ike... or what was left of ex-Ike was like finding a needle from a haystack."
LWTV Meteorologist 7: "I have a strong feeling that we won't get to see Ike in the year 2014."
LWTV Meteorologist 8: "Speaking of the name, did anyone else find the word "ike" from Estonian Language Institute's Estonian Language dictionary - a legal basis of our language?"
LWTV Meteorologist 6: "Sure. But I was on the air here when Ike made landfall and thus the staff trusted me to say following: we here at LWTV would like to send our thoughts and sympathy to everyone who suffered under Ike."
LWTV Meteorologist 4: "And with that, we here at LWTV are now signing off and returning to our regular schedule. Listeners at Weather AM, will have one hour of "Calm Evening" and we will have "Weather Evening" as usual. We thank anyone for watching and may we all have a fair weather for some time. Have a nice evening"
Credits roll as the ominous theme music plays, camera zooms out and mets shake hands, lasting until 20:58, followed by weather update aired in weather alert mode.

Autumn is coming

BREAKING NEWS: First signs of autumn have appeared on Estonian nature. In addition, weather has been quite cloudy and even a tad rainy this month. Well, entire summer has been rather ... un-summery. I have seen better summers. However, this is Estonia and I should be grateful for any good weather we have.

At least the jinx of eclipses being clouded out got broken. With difficulties I saw the solar eclipse on 1st of August, and the eclipse on 16-17 August was rather well seen too despite the fog.

Some other news - I have graduated high school. Even now, post-graduation, I occasionally see dreams of high school classes, but ... Since 19 June 2008, I am a free man. However, I will keep doing revision in some high school subjects as I am thinking of taking some extra exams so I could go to the university to study Geography and with that also Meteorology.

I am a tad mad at the International Olympic Committee right now... Their restrictions on broadcasting even made The Berlin Wall pale. In fact, their shameful restrictions on Internet streaming probably left some countries without live Olympics footage - in some countries, Olympics were not carried live, at least the opening-closing ceremonies and people were also unable to watch it from any foreign link thanks to The Great Firewall of IOC. Thanks, IOC, for ruining the show for some.

Birthday reminder: Only 12 days until my 19th birthday.

Weather camera from my neck of the woods

Trying to reincarnate the weather feed from my home:

Video chat rooms at Ustream