Multi-hop Sp-E opening to the United States on 10m...3rd/4th June 2018

At the moment, I have the HF rig tuned to the FT8 digital mode frequency of 28.074 MHz more or less all the time with the reception spots being uploaded to the PSK reporter website.

On Sunday the 3rd of June, there was a very strong Sporadic-E opening to Europe. Later in the day, there was an interesting multi-hop opening to the United States. What was unusual was just how late the opening was with many of the signals being heard at 2am local time on the 4th of June.

Looking at some plots for other local stations, it looks as if 50MHz was open as well so it must have been a pretty good opening.

As it turned out, I was too busy to get near the radio but it's interesting to see just how good FT8 performs. This digital mode seems to a critical mass of users on 28 MHz that makes the mode useful for monitoring propagation where as there is an obvious shortage of stations on modes like WSPR.