Interesting Propagation on 6m Today. Update.

Today's FT8 monitoring of 6m had some interesting results. Propagation into North America.

While this takes place in the sporadic E season I still do not think this is classical multi-hop Es, but a different mode. Because it appears in the Es season it is correlated, for sure, but what causes this propagation is not really understood.

Between 1617 and 1847 UTC signals were detected from KP4. K8, N3, N5 and XE. First time I have detected a signal from Mexico, albeit in the Northern part near Texas, there the N5 was located.

This is where a digital weak signal mode makes things interesting. We discover propagation that we could not see before because the signals were too weak to be detected reliably in SSB or CW.

The strongest signal detected was the XE with -10dB S/N, and that could probably have been detected in the CW mode. The others were much weaker, and would have been non-detectable with my setup.

Now, my setup is **very simple**: I am using the IC-7600 transceiver with a vertical triband antenna for 70cm, 2m and 6m, the Diamond V-2000. With a beam antenna, even a small one, I am sure that I could have heard more.

Of course, all this happened while I was away from the radio, but OK, I detected the propagation.

Update, Monday July 13th:

Many stations seen this afternoon, from Texas, Minnesota, Georgia, South Carolina, a host of North-Eastern states, and one Canadian station: VA3DX.

Also, I noticed that, as opposed to May and June, in July there are more openings to Northern Scandinavia. I seem to recall that this has been the case in previous years. If anyone has more data on this I would appreciate some information.