The really unusual thing for me was the short skip.
For example, I heard these four beacons via Sporadic-E....
PI7ETE/B with its 300 milliwatt output power is an unusual one but not that rare. Likewise ON0RY/B with 5 watts to a vertical half-wave is unusual but at roughly 900 kms is reasonably regular.
It's when the skip shortens to 500 kms and I can actually hear GB3RAL/B that I know things are special. What was really unusual was that the skip went as short as 350 kms and I heard GW7HDS/B in Wales on 3 watts.
I have heard Wales via Sporadic-E before on 10 metres but it is really rare. It's one thing to decode some FT8 signal buried in the noise but when you can actually hear a decent sounding cw signal then things must be good.
As for the rest of the day, this is a map of the stations heard on 28 MHz...
There are some interesting ones in there. YI3WHR in Iraq and several others from the Middle East.
A ZD7 on St Helena in the South Atlantic. There were two openings to North America... one in the afternoon and one very late in the evening.
This is the European map in more detail...
