During a Sporadic-E opening on the 20th of May 2020, I came across GW7HDS/B beacon in the south of Wales on 28.2215 MHz.
This is a very unusual beacon for me as it is 276 kms away and would normally be too far away for tropo and too close for Sporadic-E. When I heard it first, I thought it must have been some exceptionally short Sporadic-E.
I noticed however that the signal was pretty constant. After a few hours, it was still there and didn't behave like Sporadic-E.
By accident, I also noticed that the BBC Radio 4 signal on 104.9 MHz from Haverfordwest on the west coast of Wales was a big signal here. Even though it is some 140 kms distant, I was able to listen to it using just my mobile phone and the headset lead as an antenna.
Later in the evening, the GW7HDS beacon had gone and coincidentally, so had the signal on 104.9 MHz.
I often hear stations on the west coast of Wales on 10m on FT8 but it's hard to read any meaning into signals that are there in bursts and are infrequent. Are they tropo? Aircraft scatter? Back scatter?
Tropo conditions on the higher VHF bands like 2-metres and 70-cms are pretty common but not so much on the lower bands like 10-metres. Was it a tropo signal on 28 MHz? Possibly but I still suspect it might have been backscatter for Sporadic-E.
With the beacon frequency stored safely in a memory channel on the radio, I'll have to look out for it again in the future.
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