Opening to India & Indonesia on 28 MHz - Sun 3rd May 2020

Sunday 3rd May 2020. A slightly unusual day on 28 MHz...

1) There was a Sporadic-E opening to Europe but it has a distinctive 'long' feel to it. Most of the signals seemed to be 1200kms or further away. You can see on the map where the one hop Sp-E stops in a line from about the south of Italy up to the Slovak Republic at about the 2,300km limit. Anything beyond that is probably double hop.

2) Indonesia and India made it through, always unusual on 10m at the bottom of the sunspot cycle.

3) Nothing from South Africa or South America which seemed a bit unusual. This was possibly due to the fact the the Sporadic-E was very much to the east and not to the south.

4) In total, I heard 37- stations in 41 countries.

Beacons... Despite the strong FT8 signals, I only heard 5 beacons and this was despite doing quite a number of scans...

EI7GL 28188.0 OE3XAC/B 12:12 03 May IO51TUJN78SB Austria
EI7GL 28257.8 DK0TEN/B 12:10 03 May IO51TUJN47NT Fed. Rep. of Germany
EI7GL 28241.6 F5ZUU/B 12:07 03 May IO51TUJN24IL France
EI7GL 28205.0 DL0IGI/B 12:05 03 May IO51TUJN57MT Fed. Rep. of Germany
EI7GL 28194.0 IW4EIR/B 12:04 03 May IO51TUJN54AS Italy

There seems to be a distinct lack of beacons in the eastern part of Europe so perhaps that accounts for the low number heard.

These are the signals over 2,400kms away...



Txmtr Band Mode Distance Time (UTC)
YB1MIG 10m FT8 12381 km 11:41:14
VU2SGW 10m FT8 7754 km 13:34:29
A45XR 10m FT8 6428 km 15:57:29
HZ1SK 10m FT8 5273 km 17:54:44
9K2BM 10m FT8 5230 km 13:28:44
4X4MF 10m FT8 4068 km 14:32:44
UA7G 10m FT8 3864 km 15:47:14
TA7O 10m FT8 3800 km 16:31:59
TA7AL 10m FT8 3783 km 14:40:59
5B4VL 10m FT8 3733 km 14:00:29
RK7C 10m FT8 3592 km 13:34:29
RK6AH 10m FT8 3539 km 14:09:30
UD7A 10m FT8 3405 km 15:58:59
RZ6BS 10m FT8 3377 km 17:23:59
R7LV 10m FT8 3375 km 13:25:44
R7KEP 10m FT8 3263 km 13:04:14
UY7QN 10m FT8 3118 km 13:54:29
LZ2HA 10m FT8 2830 km 16:33:29
SV2HXX 10m FT8 2689 km 17:01:59
LZ2PL 10m FT8 2684 km 16:35:14
SV2JAO 10m FT8 2645 km 17:05:44
YO4RKN 10m FT8 2644 km 12:56:29
YO8SAO 10m FT8 2600 km 13:25:59
US0YA 10m FT8 2440 km 13:31:29