After a quiet start, 28 MHz on Saturday the 11th of January 2020 sprang into life from the late morning on with plenty of Sporadic-E signals on the band.
In total, I heard 247 stations in 30 countries. The unusual ones were ZS6NL in South Africa, LU8YD in Argentina and K1CA and W2VW in the USA. The American ones were interesting as it's unusual to get East-West propagation this far north during mid-Winter at the bottom of the Solar Cycle.
The Solar Flux was at 74 which is up a bit on recent weeks, sign of the next cycle starting?
The European stations heard on 28 MHz are shown below. The best thing about FT8 is that it really shows if a band is open or not. It seems as if there is some sort of Sporadic-E on 28 MHz on most days even throughout the winter.
In the days before FT8 when we only had cw beacons to listen to, that really wasn't so obvious. You could look at the text books and read that there is a Summer Sporadic-E season with a mid-Winter peak. It looks are if it never really dies away, even in the depths of Winter.
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