Britain's currently having a bit of a cold snap.
It's messed up travel, and quite wisely I've been using my holiday entitlement up. This also gives me a chance to use the radio through the day.
For those who've been in the hobby for a while, the amount of activity on 2m mobile is a lot less than it used to be, but I've caught several contacts travelling around, a much more up to date source than say, Twitter. We had a only four members turn up for the club meeting last night, however we did have participation over the radio of half a dozen who didn't or couldn't get out. Earlier in the week we did have one club member stuck in the traffic between Harrogate and York but equipped with his radio.
Snow does seem to improve VHF propagation, most likely due to the improved ground conductivity and thus reduced ground wave attenuation. The range from home seems to go from 100km to about 160km when there's some on the ground.
It's warmed up from 0800 this morning, when it was -13C although yesterday morning it was -16C - it is now -3C at 1100. For the UK that's cold, especially for the last week. The infrastructure's holding up at the moment, although we've had a water main burst locally and last time we had a proplonged cold spell we had an HV cable failure and ended upon an emergency supply for a week.
A few folk off work willpossibly mean more listening, so I'm going to have a tune around and see what I can get.
