21,000km long path opening on 50 MHz between Australia & the Canary Islands - 15th March 2022

At the start of March 2022, I reported on how there was some 18,000km plus openings on the 50 MHz band between New Zealand and the Canary Islands. See previous post HERE.

About a week later on the 15th of March 2022, this distance was exceeded when there was a long path opening on 50 MHz between the east coast of Australia and the Canary Islands. The distance on this occasion was an amazing 21,100 kms!

I'm a little bit late with the post as I've been busy but it's worth highlighting that it happened. There is no shortage of long distance openings on the 50 MHz band at the moment but these tend to be mostly North-South and TEP related.

It's easy to just look at the map and so what? But remember this was at 50 MHz, a VHF band and not down on the HF bands where long path openings are pretty common.

It looks as if FT8 was used by most stations for the opening. The partial screen grab above shows the contact between EA8TL on Tenerife and VK4MA near Brisbane.

Amazingly, Jorge EA8TL was using just a Hexbeam for the contact and he was beaming towards the Caribbean.

The opening wasn't confined to just VK4MA and EA8TL. These are some of the spots from the DX-Cluster.

EA8DO 50313 VK4HJ 21:55 14 Mar 22 ft8 Australia
EA8DO 50313 VK4MA 21:43 14 Mar 22 ft8 Australia
EA8DO 50313 VK4QG 21:43 14 Mar 22 ft8 Australia
EA8TL 50313 VK4MA 21:42 14 Mar 22 ft8 Australia

Propagation Mode??? ...It's probably no accident that all stations involved in the opening were no more than 25 degrees or so from the equator. Radio propagation at these latitudes reaches much higher frequencies than for those located much further north or south.

It's highly likely that a large part of the path was due to chordal mode without the signal hitting the ground.

As for how much of the signal was due to F2? Sp-E? TEP?

Just for the record, the solar flux on the day was 110.