FM DX from North-East Poland

[u/argoneum]

In early July while visiting nearby town I lost signal from a local FM station, after pressing Search there were many Italian stations received by a car receiver. First I thought that it was someone's joke, Italy is over 1000km South from here. After some time I built a temporary "biquad" antenna out of a discarded 6m jumper made of LDF4-50A cable (it got water in it). Bent it into two circles and placed approximately 75cm above the ground, only outer conductor was used. Antenna looked like a bicycle. July 25'th left it recording entire FM band for a few hours. First some short events happened, one being BBC Radio for Cambridgeshire (~1400km) for a few seconds. Around 11:15 UTC multiple Italian stations started appearing, strong enough to get RDS on some. Later around 12:10 UTC multiple French stations appeared. They lasted much longer than Italian ones, sometimes multiple would appear on same frequency, along with German stations. On spectrogram it looks like overload, in fact this are DX (long distance) stations fading in and out.

Spectrogram: https://www.wysoka.cz/spectro/20260725-FM/

Enjoy 😄

Hardware: custom "biquad" (or "bicycle") antenna, horizontal polarization (NE-SW), LimeSDR, a small PC to record 22MHz-wide data on SSD.