Modest opening to Europe on 28 MHz - 2nd May 2021

Sunday 2nd May 2021: This was a reasonably modest day on the 28 MHz band with 198 stations in 37 countries heard on FT8. The map above shows what I heard. It's interesting just how the Sporadic-E footprints can be pretty small and clusters of signals from a certain region make it through. 

Notice the batch of signals from Sardinia and yet there was hardly anything from France for most of the day.

I did a few scans of the beacon band and I heard two...
EI7GL 28243.0 F5ZWE/B 15:49 02 May IO51TU<ES>JN02TW France
EI7GL 28271.0 OZ7IGY 12:07 02 May PI4 -14 dB Q=74 1393 km <es> Denmark

As you can see from the second spot, I was messing about with the PI4 software to decode the signals from the Danish beacon.

I tried listening on WSPR for a while but it was useless. On 28 MHz, WSPR is fine if the band is open to say the UK, Netherlands and Germany because there are a lot of stations there sending out WSPR transmissions. There is a major lack of active WSPR stations on 10m in France, Spain and Portugal which means the mode is of little use for propagation tests in certain directions.