Opening to California on 28 MHz - Sun 27th Feb 2022

Sunday 27th February 2022: For the last two weeks, conditions on the 10m band seemed to be pretty mediocre with relatively few good openings to the United States. That changed on the 27th of February with a very good opening to California.

The map above shows the WSPR signals heard on 28.1246 MHz. As well as the northerly path to California, there were signals from the German Antarctic research station DP0DVN and the German Antarctic research ship DP0POL.

It's safe to say that if this map was for FT8 then there would be a LOT more signals. WSPR is a very good beacon mode but there is a lack of stations in many countries.

Beacons... These were the beacons heard in a short space of about 20 minutes.

Spotter Freq. DX Time Info Country - Pwr
EI7GL 28300.0 K6FRC/B 19:13 27 Feb IO51TU<F2>CM97HP United States - 100w
EI7GL 28298.0 K5TLL/B 19:12 27 Feb IO51TU<F2>EM51GG United States - 25w
EI7GL 28244.3 KC4EOG/B 19:11 27 Feb IO51TU<F2>FM05HI United States - 4w
EI7GL 28222.5 KA4SEY/B 19:07 27 Feb IO51TU<F2>EM95VP United States - 3w
EI7GL 28222.6 N1NSP/B 19:05 27 Feb IO51TU<F2>FM17RD United States - 10w
EI7GL 28206.1 KM4NBB/B 19:04 27 Feb IO51TU<F2>EM84BM United States - 5w
EI7GL 28200.0 W6WX/B 19:01 27 Feb IO51TU<F2>CM97BD United States - 100w

The two stations in bold were in California which means that it would have been possible to work someone on CW and it wasn't just a case of weak signals buried in the noise.

The solar flux on the day was only 97 so I'm not sure why conditions were so good.