Trans-Atlantic opening to the USA on 28 MHz - Sat 23rd May 2020

Saturday 23rd May 2020. The 28 MHz band was pretty much open all day with strong signals from all over Europe. I noticed some trans-Atlantic signals late in the evening so I left the radio monitoring the FT8 frequency overnight.

This was the first real multi-hop opening to the USA so far in 2020. The distances in the USA were from 4380 kms to 6370 kms so  think this was probably 3 hop Sporadic-E.

At this time of year, I use FT8 pretty much as a propagation tool. I listen for a while to upload reports to the PSKReporter website and I then check who I have heard in the last 15 minutes. If things get unusual then I start tuning around.

WSPR... When I noticed the FT8 signals were getting very strong, I left the radio on the WSPR frequency. As you can see from the map, there was plenty of short skip on the band in the range of 500 to 1000 kms. i.e. UK, Belgium, N France and the Netherlands.

What I find interesting about WSPR are those signals from stations running less than 100 milliwatts...

Timestamp Call MHz SNR Drift Grid Pwr Reporter RGrid km az # Spots
2020-05-23 17:14 G4KPX 28.126027 -17 0 JO02dj 0.005 EI7GL IO51tu 594 268 1 decode
2020-05-23 17:06 DL0PBS 28.125990 -8  0 JO33 0.05 EI7GL IO51tu 1048 266 4 
2020-05-23 16:36 F4HON 28.126005 -20 0 JN19ij 0.01 EI7GL IO51tu 827 294 2 decodes
2020-05-23 16:26 PD0KT 28.126030 -15 0 JO33le 0.01 EI7GL IO51tu 1046 268  12 decodes
2020-05-23 16:16 ON4LUK 28.126192 -20 -1 JO11 0.05 EI7GL IO51tu 782 277 3 
2020-05-23 15:30 DF4PV 28.126078 -18 -1 JN49ax 0.05 EI7GL IO51tu 1167 287 17 
2020-05-23 12:58 LA1G 28.126045 -21 0 JO49ub 0.02 EI7GL IO51tu 1387 243 7 
2020-05-23 12:56 OZ1IPH 28.126089 -8 0 JO47xi 0.02 EI7GL IO51tu 1324 250 4 
2020-05-23 12:56 OZ2M 28.125996 -15 0 JO65fr 0.02 EI7GL IO51tu 1428 261 4 

As you can see from the edited heard list above, two were running as little as 10 milliwatts and G4KPX has just 5 milliwatts!

QRSS... I had a listen for some QRSS signals from the UK when I was getting started hearing WSPR signals from there...

As outlined in a previous post, most of the UK stations are around London which is about 700kms from here.

The mystery signal 'CDJ' turned out to be Patrick ON4CDJ in Belgium, a distance of about 900 kms. It should be easy to get a proper decode in the future.

I also noticed hints of a very wavy QRSS signal above G0FTD. I think it's probably M0BMN in the west of England. As he is in IO82WN at a distance of about 430 kms, it is very short for Sporadic-E on 28 MHz and will probably take an exceptional opening to get a good signal.