Interesting time on 6m.
I still have my FT8 monitoring running on 50.313MHz. Today that kind of monitoring gave an interesting result. I did not make a QSO, but I made the following observation:
From about 1542 and 1809 I received ZD7BG, mostly at lower levels, but peaking at -1dB SNR.
This happens with a sub-par system, running the 6m element of my R-6000 antenna (feed point at 6m) with an old Tokyo Hy Power handheld radio. The R6000 has very poor performance on 6m, but is quite good on 10-12-15-17-20m.
I could see in my listings on WSJT that several local stations worked QSOs with the ZD7, but I saw this a few hours later.
To me this shows the value of monitoring 6m outside the sporadic E main season.
To be fair, there was some sporadic E on 6m with good signals from Southern Europe. This happens all year round, and the past few days there have been some openings.
Sporadic E alone cannot explain signals from St. Helena, though. The distance is just over 8000km. I suspect that this was sporadic E propagation feeding a signal into the TEP (Trans-Equatorial Propagation) zone. The Solar flux today was relatively low at 115, so F2 propagation is very unlikely. Also, the time of detecting the propagation makes F2 propagation even more likely, as in the North-South paths like this one F2 propagation would peak about local noon.
To me this shows the value of 24/7 monitoring of 6m, especially at times outside the peak of the solar cycle.
1 comment:
Very unusual but also a sign of life on the 6m outside the ES-season. I saw that he was also seen in the USA. I worked ZD7BG this year but in the season late in the evening. Interesting. 73, Bas
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