Sunday, March 24, 2019

Sporadic-E opening on 28 MHz - Sun 24th March 2019


It looks as if there was a good Sporadic-E opening on 28 MHz on Sunday the 24th of March although I was missing for all of it! At least that's one good thing with FT8, you can still upload reception reports when you're not even there.

Looking at the number of spots, it would seem as if it was a good opening. I would also suspect that the fact it was a Sunday and people were off helped boost the numbers as well.

I noticed on the blog of Geoff G0LUJ that he heard ZP4KFX in Paraguay as well today on 28 MHz. Looking at the PSK Reporter website, I noticed that John GM4JWA in the north of Scotland also heard ZP4KFX as well as five stations in Brazil. What's interesting here is that GM4WJA seems to have been the only one hearing those Brazilian stations.

It hard to be certain but it's likely that there was Sporadic-E for the first hop from Scotland down to an area around the Azores and then on via F2 from there to South America. Those further south weren't hearing the Brazilian stations as they were in the Sporadic-E skip zone.

The list of stations heard here on FT8 on 28 MHz is shown below. The opening seems to have been roughly between 10:30 and 13:00 UTC.




No comments: