What to do when HF bands are noisey?

[AC2OY]

Here are a couple of suggestions to improve your ground system. Ground rods should be no closer than twice their length. Putting them closer does not increase your ground. It looks like your master ground rod is where your surge arrestor is located. Your electrical ground should also connect to the same point along with your equipment grounds (is that the ground wire going into the house). The National Electrical Code requires that ALL ground rods be connected together to the same point including the electrical ground. It looks like the surge arrestor could use some more weather proofing. What you have is pretty good and probably better than most ground systems
BB

Thank you I can't take credit a member of my club who is a engineer did the grounding,soldering, and I did the drilling and the hammering. We still have one more antenna to install but for now I'm having a lot of fun on HF!! I haven't tried that antenna on 6 meters yet but I think I read that somebody tuned it to 6 could be wrong.

 

[AC9KH]

I haven't tried that antenna on 6 meters yet but I think I read that somebody tuned it to 6 could be wrong.

I operate a six a lot. While some HF antennas will tune up on 6, they usually don't work well. When the band opens you can work it with a piece of wire draped over your curtain rods. But it will end up being a lonely place waiting for it to open on the E;s. If you want work six on a regular basis with tropo or EME, yagis (usually stacked arrays) big power (full legal limit), phased dipole arrays, or similar with horizontal polarization are needed. My current EME array is 16 cross-fired dipoles with 8 co-phased pairs aimed at the eastern horizon. I'm constantly tuning and tweaking the array to get more gain out of it. But when the sunspots die out in the next few years and HF goes dead except for 160, move on up to 6 meters and go long path off the moon.

 

[wb6uqa]

Try connecting a quarter wave wire to the back of your radio. One for each band. Can be bundled.Grounding lug

 

[WyoDuner]

Since you have a TS-2000 why not try the satellites? That's, in part at least, what that rig was built for. Of course, that's a whole different thing to learn but no worries about band conditions or static with satellites.

 

[chrissim]

Before I even load up cluster programs or turn on the radio, I always check two sources. The first is QRZ.com. On the right hand side you'll see information that will help you determine what to expect from the bands. It's called "Solar Terrestrial Data/Predictions." While it's not necessarily indicative of what to absolutely expect, it's a good indication of what bands are open. Solarham.net is essentially the same thing.

The second source is the NASA Space Weather Enthusiast webpage. It'll give you information pertaining to radio blackouts and the like.

For experimentation purposes, I recently erected an N4GG array and noticed I had a constant S4 noise level. I thought that was peculiar so I checked weather data and realized that the bands were going to be noisy for a couple of days. Those three webpages really help you get a handle on certain performance parameters.