Contact between Ireland and Slovenia on 40 MHz - 31st Oct 2020

 

While the main Sporadic-E season occurs mainly from May to July every year, there are still smaller openings at other times of the year.

One such opening occurred on the 31st of October 2020 when EI4GNB and S5/M0MPM made the most of it to complete an FT8 contact on 40 MHz.

Michael, S5/M0MPM writes... "After a few trials over the last few weeks, I heard/saw Tim's signals a few times, in FT8 and JT65, and finally we managed a contact. Tim contacted me by Whatsapp to warn about the opening, luckily I was available.

Both 6M and 10m were open between Slovenia and Ireland, and so it worked on 8m as well.

Tim was quite strong with me, but unfortunately I only had my G5RV antenna available, with a tuner.

It tunes alright on 10 and 6, so I gave it a try on 8 and the trx was happy enough (an FT857D) but my signals were quite weak with Tim, despite the 50w from my side.

Distance covered: 1730 kms (JN75PX to IO63WE) Signals were TX:+5  RX:-20. Time was 13:40z on 31Oct 2020"

40 MHz allocations... At the time of writing of this post (Nov 2020), a total of four countries have some sort of access to the 40 MHz band... Ireland (EI), Slovenia (S5), Lithuania (LY) and South Africa (ZS).

Most of the activity is centered around 40.680 MHz which is in the middle of the ISM (Industrial, Scientific, Medical) band which goes from 40.660 MHz to 40.700 MHz.

More information about the 40 MHz band can be found on my 40 MHz page... https://ei7gl.blogspot.com/p/40-mhz.html