Opening to India on 28 MHz? - Tues 25th Feb 2020

The map above shows the FT8 signals that I heard on 28 MHz on Tuesday the 25th of February 2020. The big suprise was the signal from VU2PTT India but was it real?

It was a really unusual signal to hear. First off, here are the decodes that I received...

093045 -16 -0.3 1864 ~  CQ VU2PTT MK82
093115 -19 -0.3 1864 ~  CQ VU2PTT MK82
093145 -17 -0.3 1865 ~  CQ VU2PTT MK82
093215 -20 -0.2 1865 ~  CQ VU2PTT MK82
093330 -18 -0.3 1867 ~  CQ VU2PTT MK82
093400 -15 -0.3 1868 ~  CQ VU2PTT MK82
093500 -16 -0.3 1869 ~  CQ VU2PTT MK82

At this time in the morning, it was the only signal that I heard on 28 MHz. What was also unusual was that according to PSKReporter, no-one else reported VU2PTT on 28 MHz. If the signal is genuine then he called CQ on FT8 on 28MHz and I was the only person to hear him.

If the signal was fake then I would have expected others to have heard the fake signal also.

I could see that he was on 14 MHz, 18 MHz and 21 MHz also today so at least I know he was active.

My intuition is that the signal was genuine and it was a double hop F2 signal from Karnataka, India, a distance of about 8,600kms.

I was wondering if the signal was related to sunset in India and it wasn't. Karnataka is 5h 30m ahead of UTC so 09:30 UTC here is 15:00 in India i.e. in the middle of the afternoon.

Some Sporadic-E signals appeared on the band around 14:15 UTC and lasted until about 19:40 UTC. A list of stations heard is shown below. The one interesting one is PY5VB in Brazil which didn't appear on the PSK Reporter page for me. Maybe the signal from India was genuine after all.

The Solar Flux today was 71 which is pretty much rock bottom of the sunspot cycle.

141415  -5 -0.0 2143 ~  CQ CT1ADT IM57
162300 -16 -0.1  879 ~  CQ EA7/LA9DL
162330 -16  0.0  734 ~  CQ EA4AGI IN80
162400   2  0.3  733 ~  CQ EA4AGI IN80
163745  -3 -0.0  849 ~  CQ EA4GYW IN80
170200 -14 -0.1 1487 ~  CQ EA7JXA IM67
171130 -15 -0.1 1443 ~  G4FVZ PY5VB RR73
180130  14 -0.2 1278 ~  F4BVK CT1IW IM58
180930 -11 -0.2  579 ~  CQ EA5AHQ IM99
182300  -5 -0.2 2213 ~  F4BVK EA1CCM IN52
184745  -9  0.1 1685 ~  CQ CT1ETL IM58
184930 -18 -0.3  687 ~  CQ CT1CEM IM58
190400  -4 -0.3 2200 ~  CQ EA7JXZ IM77
190830   1 -0.3  606 ~  CQ CT1HMN IM58