Live amateur radio reception reports from the full PSK Reporter feed, during the total solar eclipse of 12 August 2026. Every dot is one station hearing another. The question is whether the Moon’s shadow changes what they can hear.
Density of reception-report path midpoints over the last 10 minutes, on a 2° grid. The orange line is the track of the Moon’s umbral shadow across the Earth; the filled circle is where it is now. There is no map underneath — the shape of the continents is drawn purely by where radio amateurs live.
How much is being heard. Sensitive to how many people are on air, so read it alongside the panel to its right, not on its own.
How well it is being heard, in dB. Much less sensitive to how many people are on air, so this is the more trustworthy of the two.
The same numbers as above for every band at once, and the accessible equivalent of the charts. Compare each zone against “far”: it is the control. If every column moves together you are watching sunset, not the eclipse.
Radio signals on these frequencies bounce off the ionosphere, a layer of the atmosphere that the Sun keeps electrically charged. The lowest layer, the one that mostly just absorbs signals, loses its charge within a couple of minutes once sunlight stops. So when the Moon blocks the Sun, that absorbing layer should briefly fade, and the lower frequency bands (160m, 80m, 40m) should get better — a false nightfall lasting about an hour. Higher layers recover much more slowly, so the higher bands should respond late and weakly, if at all. That difference in timing between bands is the interesting part.
Each spot is placed at the midpoint of the path between the two stations, which is roughly where the signal bounced. Zones are how far that midpoint is from the shadow’s track: corridor under 800 km, near 800–2000 km, penumbral 2000–4000 km, and far beyond that, which is the control.
The honest caveat: this eclipse happens at European dusk, and the low bands improve at dusk anyway, every single day. That is what the “far” control is for, and why the real answer comes from comparing today against the same hours on an ordinary day.