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NCDXF/IARU beacons on 18110 kHz: the 17 m band checked every three minutes
The same eighteen beacons as on 20 m, ten seconds later on 18110 kHz. A quiet band with little else on it, so the Morse callsigns and the four shrinking dashes stand out and tell you where 17 m is open.
What you hear
The chain described in the main article: a callsign in Morse, then dashes at 100, 10, 1 and 0.1 watts, a new beacon every ten seconds, eighteen in three minutes. On 18110 kHz each beacon comes ten seconds after its slot on 14100, so 4U1UN opens the cycle at ten seconds past the top of every third minute, VE8AT at twenty, and so on.
Who transmits and why
The Northern California DX Foundation and the IARU, through the same eighteen hosts worldwide. The 17 m band is narrow and lightly used, with no contests, which is exactly why a propagation check on it is so clean: there is rarely anything on the frequency but the beacons.
When and where to listen
17 m behaves like a gentler 20 m: it opens later in the morning and closes earlier in the evening, favours daylight and the hours around sunset, and in a good solar cycle stays open to the Americas from Europe well into the night. Mornings bring the Asian beacons, afternoons the African ones, evenings the American ones. At a solar minimum the band may carry only the nearest beacons, which makes any distant one on 18110 a real sign of conditions.
In ShackDeck
Station catalogue → Beacons → NCDXF beacons 17 m. The program picks a public receiver that covers 18110 kHz, tunes it in CW and shows the waterfall with the stepped dashes; no receiver, antenna or account of your own is needed.