In the morning, there was a weak Sporadic-E opening. The band closed in the early afternoon and the major opening came in the late afternoon and evening.
Sometime Sporadic-E seems random but it almost appears as if whatever is causing the Sporadic-E conditions at the moment is repeating itself every day.
As can be seen from the map below, there was very little double hop to the east.
The major opening started at about 15:00 UTC to the south and lasted until about 20:00 UTC.
The map below shows the European stations heard. The big difference here is that many of the FT8 signals from the east were buried in the noise. The ones from the south were often up to S9.
Beacons... These are the beacons heard which is perhaps suprisingly small considering there were S9 FT8 signals on the band and several band scans were done.
EI7GL 28271.0 OZ7IGY/B 18:57 19 May IO51TU ES JO55WM Denmark
EI7GL 28245.3 DB0TEN/B 17:18 19 May IO51TU ES JO42UV Fed. Rep. of Germany
EI7GL 28255.8 C30P/B 16:44 19 May IO51TU ES JN02SM Andorra
EI7GL 28251.1 ED4YAK/B 16:43 19 May IO51TU ES IN80FK Spain
EI7GL 28205.0 DL0IGI/B 16:42 19 May IO51TU ES JN57MT Fed. Rep. of Germany
EI7GL 28169.3 ZB2TEN/B 16:41 19 May IO51TU ES IM76HD Gibraltar
It suggests perhaps that while the conditions were good at times, it was also very patchy. DB0TEN/B in the west of Germany was a reasonable signal but none of the other beacons in the northern part of Germany were heard.
I heard Italian stations calling CQ in cw yet I didn't hear any of the Italian beacons.
50 MHz... The MUF did get up to 50 MHz but when I did listen, I just heard some of the AM70 stations in Spain way down in the noise on cw.
EI...... I heard seven EI station on the band... a new record! :)
These are the stations heard on FT8 on 28 MHz on Sunday the 19th of May 2019...
