Late opening to EA8 on 28 MHz - Tues 30th Apr 2019

In contrast to the last few days, Tuesday the 30th of April was really quiet on 28 MHz for the most part. In fact, it had seemed pretty remarkable earlier in the day that so few FT8 signals had been heard.

By the late evening, I had pretty much given up hope of hearing anything and I wrote up a blog post with a map to say just how quiet it had been. Needless to say after getting the post ready, the band opened to the Canary Islands!

This is the updated map...

These are the stations uploaded to PSKReporter...
IK2IQC 10m FT8 1467 km 20:44:00
EA8DFQ 10m FT8 2705 km 20:34:29
G0EHG 10m FT8 446 km 19:34:46
2E0XXO 10m FT8 551 km 19:34:46
G3TKF 10m FT8 406 km 16:29:18
G0OYQ 10m FT8 579 km 12:04:00
DO1JTS 10m FT8 1080 km 09:35:33

The opening to the Canary Islands lasted from 20:04 to 20:36 UTC. I actually heard six EA8 stations but only one was uploaded to the PSKReporter website.

201015   9 -0.2 1274 ~  CQ AM870PT
201930  -4  0.2 1276 ~  CQ EA8DFQ IL28
201945   9  0.0 1019 ~  <...> EA8SG
202015  -3  0.0 2520 ~  <...> EA8SR IL18
202015 -22  0.2 2461 ~  <...> EA8TH IL18
203515 -14  0.0 1013 ~  EA8DER R-07

As for the mode of propagation? Multi hop Sp-E? F2? The path from Ireland to the Canary Islands was close to sunset so I wonder if that was a factor?