French Guyana worked on 28 MHz...

Tues 8th May 2018... The Sporadic-E season is now well under way with plenty of signals being heard on the 10 metre band. On Tuesday the 8th of May, the band was open to part of Europe like Germany, Poland, Austria, Czech Republic, North Italy and Spain. As Sporadic-E signals go, it was nothing out of the ordinary with most around the 1200 to 2000km distance.

FY5KE... In the evening (16:45 UTC), there was an opening to South America which was interesting. I heard a station in Brazil on SSB and I worked FY5KE in French Guyana on CW with the first call.

Perhaps not the rarest of calls but interesting all the same. It's great to have the 10 metre vertical working properly again after repairing it last weekend.

The distance was 6600 kms which was pretty good. Almost certainly, the first hop from Ireland was via Sporadic-E out into the North Atlantic...maybe 1500kms or so... and the rest of the roughly 4000 kms was via other multiple hops.

Even though the Solar Flux is down around 70, F2 layer propagation might be possible from more southern latitudes like Spain, hence the need for the first Sp-E hop from Ireland.

Fishing buoy... I also came across a fishing buoy beacon on 28.420 MHz. This one was giving out a 5 second carrier followed by the letter 'D' (I think as it was very weak) and then would stay silent for 2m 25s. As far as I know, these are used to mark the location of fishing nets. Even though they are illegal, they seem to be pretty common and I would guess that this one was probably operating somewhere out in the Atlantic? The fact I heard it around the same time as the opening to South America would suggest this to be the case.

FY5KE worked on 10 metres

I had a listen to the 10 metre band late this afternoon and I noticed some weak cw beacons around 28.204 / 28.205 MHz. They were very weak but I could just make out the N3 callsign and the FN in the locators which meant the band was open to North America. Some F2 propagation at last!

I had a look on the DX Cluster and it was quiet enough. I noticed that FY5KE had been spotted on 28.030 MHz. When I listened, sure enough he was there but he was very weak. He was calling CQ a lot so it wasn't like he had a pile up.

I heard EI4KN call and work him with ease. Ronan is in Cloughjordan on the Tipperary / Offaly border, about 120kms to the north. That's a nice distance for a direct path on 10m. I don't believe it was backscatter as the band wasn't that good.

I had a look around the band and it was pretty quiet. Went back to 28.030 MHz and just left the rig there. After about 10 minutes, he came up out of the noise and I worked him first call with about 50 watts.

My first QSO on 28 MHz since I put the antenna up back in mid-November. It was also my first contact on 28 MHz since October 2012.

It was only later that I realised that FY5KE is actually at the Space Centre in French Guyana.

I had a look around the band and it seemed dead. I put the rig on WSPR and FY5KE popped up there as well.

It was hardly a huge opening but interesting all the same.