xmas day France 94.7 now, probably legal kind of pop rock punk. E layer oddly quite active at this time of year as well as
mid summer. something to do with longest and shortest day it seems. You get the peak E layer activity around a week either side of longest and shortest days,

Merry Christmas all, enjoy any radio stuff you are up to,

There was a french station there on the nearest sdr here used to there alot of the time, the owner had the aerial pointing south, I couldn’t hear anything here apart from during a really strong lift. Some said you hear french stations often in yorkshire thats not my experience at all

Very random the E layer and other lifts, it all is rando, the E and F layer.... but E layer especially out of control. Some years you get Dutch, other Danish, I heard Swede's only once, I have had Italian, France and Germany as well down here. Interestingly once you start hearing them on a E layer skip, the same stations seem to often come for the rest of the year with maybe a shift every now and then. As such if you hear Italiians first you tend to get lots of Italian stations through the summer. At least that is the pattern anyway.

There is a weather system change so maybe there could be some E layer stuff as things gets moved around up there ?

One theory is it something to do with wind sheer I suppose high altitude crosswinds at very high altitudes somehow ionizing things briefly in E layer, it is not well understood as it is so random and fleeting.

Funny thing radio for sure. Need a bit of luck to hear it.

Maybe if its aimed at upward angle it might bounce down further away, I was thinking in future most fm signals will be closed down, even so seems that community stations can travel a long way, so will likely be able to dx, maybe a slightly crackpot idea I don't know to have directional aerial transmitting aiming up at layers of the atmosphere maybe it could bounce off them and go over the horizon, very far fetched. I worry about fm falling silent, thinking having a similar thing to the skywave lets us hear dutch stations on mw at night.

When the atmospherics are intense, even local stations can be wiped out. It's been a few years since it was that extreme but it's interesting to hear how they do things elsewhere. Italian dance stations for example, hearing them play some quite heavy EDM at drivetime whilst sitting in traffic on the M25