FT8 on 28 MHz... Sat 12th May 2018

Another day listening to FT8 signals on 28 MHz and it was another busy one. Although it was similar to the previous days, it was different. The chart below shows what was heard during the 24 hours of Saturday the 12th of May 2018...

Nothing exotic from the east this time but it did open to North America! These signals from the south-east of the USA and one from Canada were heard around 14:00 to 15:00 UTC and were most likely multi-hop Sporadic-E. The ones from the USA were around the 6000km mark... three x 2,000km hops. The Canadian one was around 4,000kms... two 2,000 hops.

The South American signals were interesting. The ones from Brazil and Argentina were from the afternoon while the three signals from Chile were in the late evening.

The map below shows the signals here a bit closer to home...

Interesting signals from Mauritania and Western Sahara, both possibly double hop sporadic-e.

Sometimes it's the signals that are missing are the interesting one. No signals from Denmark or the south of Sweden today although I know there were stations active there.

Even though the maps might suggest that the band was wide open all day, it really wasn't. This is what was heard during the 17 hours or so that the band was open. At any one instant, the band was often open to just a small area but over the day, different signals appeared as the conditions changed.

Overall, I heard 519 stations today in 61 countries.