50 MHz South Pacific Summer Propagation season 2020-2021... by CE3SX

Back in mid-December 2020, I had a post up on the blog about some remarkable openings on 50 MHz between Australia and South America with some contacts were up to 13,000kms in length... https://ei7gl.blogspot.com/2020/12/remarkable-13000-km-opening-on-6-metres.html

Pipe CE3SX in Chile has now compiled his own report on the 50 MHz South Pacific Summer Propagation season 2020-2021.

The report covers 6m openings from Chile to Australia & New Zealand from the 8th of December 2020 to the 23rd of January 2021.

In summary, CE3SX in Chile completed 77 QSO's on 50 MHz across the South Pacific... 47 with New Zealand (ZL) which is obviously closer, 26 with Australia (VK) and 4 with the Chatham Islands (ZL7).

64 of the contacts were via the JT65 digital mode, 9 via FT8 and 3 via FT4.

The first contact of the Summer season was to ZL1RS on the 8th of December 2020 which was also the first South America to Oceania 50 MHz contact of the season.

The first contact to Australia was to VK4MA on the 9th of December 2020.

The longest contact was with VK4BLK which was 12,380 kms in length.

The map above shows the locator squares worked by CE3SX on 50 MHz during the 2020-2021 South Pacific Summer Season.

Mode of Propagation???... The maximum distance for one Sporadic-E hop is about 2300 kms. If all of these 10,000 to 12,000km openings were due to multi-hop Sporadic-E then a lot of patches of Sporadic-E had to line up in a row and at the correct distance for it to work.

It has been suggested that part of the propagation path may have been to Polar Mesospheric Summer Echos (PMSE) with electrons gathering around ice crystals.

The full report from Pipe CE3SX can be seen here... https://www.qsl.net/ce3sad/SPSP.html