I recently decided to vacation in Iceland, heading toward the cold when everyone else is heading toward the tropics for spring break. I wanted to see the aurora and a vacation in the snow has been on my mind for a few years now. So, why not take the opportunity to create and test a portable set up? My first dx-pedition!
My Setup
What Happened?
I had a great time! Oh – with dx’ing? Total failure. I landed during a geomagnetic storm and hams across the world were grumbling about the bad state of bands – well imagine it near the polar cap! Here’s a better synopsis from Claude:
Right as you arrived on March 19, a G2–G3 geomagnetic storm hit — triggered by CMEs that left the Sun on March 16 and timed to arrive at the worst possible moment. The March equinox made it worse, since Earth’s magnetosphere is more open to incoming solar wind around the equinoxes, amplifying the impact.
For DX from Iceland specifically, this was about as bad as it gets. The storm energizes the polar ionosphere, causing the D-layer to absorb HF signals rather than refract them — and operating from Iceland means you’re sitting inside the auroral oval, the zone that takes the hardest hit. Long-haul paths to Asia, the Pacific, and even deep into North America all cross polar regions that were essentially blacked out. Any signals that did make it through suffered severe fading and Doppler smearing, which is particularly brutal for FT8 since the decoder needs a stable 15-second window to complete a decode.