On Saturday the 14th of December, conditions on the band were poor and I just heard a few stations on FT8 from around Europe. I scanned the CW and SSB portion of the band once and I heard just one very weak German station on CW.
I wasn't around on Sunday the 15th of December but I left the radio on monitoring the band. It seems as if the band was much better with plenty of Sporadic-E signals from Europe.
The really interesting signals are the ones from further away. For example, I heard Greece and Turkey... double hop Sporadic-E or F2 propagation?
In Africa, I heard TT8SN in Chad as well as three in South Africa. 3B8CW on Mauritius in the Indian Ocean was also heard.
Considering it's December and we're at the bottom of the sunspot cycle, it was a reasonable opening.
(Solar Flux: 71 / Sunspot number 0)
4 comments:
Certainly a good opening John. Unfortunately I had less time as expected for the contest. Just when the propagation went up I had to go. You can't have everything....we always get next years 10m contest. 73, Bas
Great to hear some activity. With me down here in the south west, we had PY,CX,LU. No South Africa to me. V5 and FR were in. D4 was weak. 4x was strong with some other EU es.
I was only qrv for short periods.
73 Steve
M0BKL
Bas, I saw your blog post and the FR station on 10m. There's something special about hearing the Indian Ocean on 28 MHz.
Steve, interesting that the 4X station in Israel was strong. It might suggest that it was one F2 hop rather than multi-hop Sporadic-E.
Hi John
Not sure what the propagation was but i had an ft8 contact with FR4OO at 10:45
on Saturday morning. He was on my screen for about an hour. As the E's were not that steady i guess it would have been F2 ?
Had a couple of SSB contacts into EU on Sunday, with a spot into PY + Vp8lp later in the evening.
Just goes to show what can happen if you throw some RF in the air!
Stu 2e0xxo
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