Wednesday 21st April 2021: This was a pretty reasonable day on the 28 MHz band with an opening to Brazil and to Europe.
Opening to Brazil: I have a large local hill in the direction of South America so if I hear anything then it must have been a good opening. As for the propagation mode??? I think it's impossible for anyone to state definitively what it was. It could have been...
a) 100% F2 propagation from Ireland to Brazil
b) One hop Sporadic-E to the south of me and then via F2 propagation to Brazil.
c) One hop Sporadic-E to the south of me and then via TEP propagation to Brazil.
The Brazilian signals were heard between 15:00 and 19:00 UTC. It's possible it was just one of the propagation modes above, perhaps it was a combination of them at different times. That's the thing with 28 MHz, sometimes you can never be certain as so many propagation modes overlap.
Opening to Europe: There was a modest Sporadic-E opening to Europe as can be seen from the distribution of stations above.
Overall, a total of 178 stations in 19 countries were heard. The solar flux was at 80 which was slightly higher than recent weeks.
2 comments:
Hello John,
I didn't manage to catch the nice opening at daylight. I was unable to get my signal to south america. But I heard numerous stations from argentina, Brazil and Chile. I was spotted once by a ZD7 as ODX. Made one very difficult QSO to France. This was all after sunset. Last LU was spotted around 20:30 UTC... I hope the ES season will no finally start this weekend....
73, Bas
Hi John,
50MHz TEP was very good on the 21st, mostly at latitudes closer to the geomagnetic equator than Ireland. However, we did have a brief opening here; I was lucky enough to QSO VP8A in GD18(BH?), at about 12,464km. I always look for TEP, especially after solar events, but I wasn't expecting that at all! VP8A was in/out here between 17:33z and 17:45z, peaking -14 FT8, and also seen working CE8, PY5, LU6 and EA7 (nothing from any of those here). Apart from him, the only other signal I decoded was one sequence from PY3KN, GF49, after VP8A had faded, at 17:54z.
The "Magic Band", indeed!
73, Mark EI3KD IO51vw
Post a Comment