Frank Donovan, W3LPL gave a presentation recently to the Madison DX Club titled 'Understanding 6 Meter Sporadic E Propagation'. The talk which is about an hour in length covers Sporadic-E propagation with an emphasis on the 50 MHz (6m) band.
The talk is given from a North American perspective but the distances discussed are applicable to stations in Europe as well.
The talk not only covers single hop Sporadic-E but multi-hop as well as shown in the image above.
Chordal hop propagation refers to where a single Sporadic-E cloud refracts the signal enough that it is able to propagate to the next Sporadic-E cloud instead of relying on a lossy ground bounce.
The talk includes some interesting slides which show the height of the Sporadic-E cloud changing with the time of day. This suggests that the longest single hop distances should occur in the early morning or early evening.
He also expands the discussion to cover Trans-Equatorial Propagation (TEP) whereby stations in the USA can link via Sporadic-E to the TEP zone to the south and then onto to South America.
The same scenario would apply to stations in Europe trying to work South Africa and South America on 6m.
The presentation is shown above.
