4m band DX challenge (ES) season 2020 results

This was the first year I actually am seriously DXing on the 4 meter band (70 MHz). And I was having a blast. The ES-season started early this year and counted some great openings in May,. Unfortunately I was busy with the PE75FREE activation and did not have any time before to build the planned 70MHz yagi. When PE5TT Marcel showed the installation of his 4m/6m duoband beam and told the DX results he had I immidiatly searched for building plans. I found a nice design from YU7EF for a 10 element 4m/6m duoband beam which fitted on the boom I already had. Well regular readers of this blog have been reading about it. So this post is about what is achieved in the 2020 ES season on 70MHz.

First QSO on 14 June was on a local FM channel (70.450) with PA3GAZ and PE0XJ. After that I had to wait for propagation. My first QSO outside Netherlands was with DL1OBF at 17 June. On 18 June I had my first QSO with OZ1DLD (Denmark) on CW!  There was a nice opening at 19 June which gave me a lot of DXCC in the log. First real DX (well what is real DX?) was with TF8SM (Iceland), it looked like the band was already closed but then I received him on the back of my beam, after turning the signal was pretty good and we made a QSO. EA8DBM (Canary Islands) is my best DX so far with over 3000km, the QSO was easy and I could decode him almost a whole afternoon at 2 July. 9H1TX and 9H1FL (Malta) were worked at 14 July. A lot of other European countries already in the log. So, another few new DXCC was going to get difficult I thought.

But then ZB2GI from Gibraltar appeared on the band and was contacted on 26 July. On that same day I saw EA9IB from Cueta&Mellila (Africa) spotted on SSB. I didn't have high hopes since I lost him once before. But propagation was in our favour and like you switch a light on and off the propagation was rising for a moment enough the make the contact. Then the ES-season went on slowly, there was some ES but not in the direction of potential new DXCC.

The Perseid meteor shower was appearing and I decided to switch over to MSK144 to support luck. It was a honour to work my fellow blogger GM4FVM Jim (Scotland) on meteorscatter as one of the first on 4m from that DXCC. I especially worked some Scandinavian stations on MSK144. One of the best was after a nice sked with SM4KYN on 70.137,5Mhz MSK144, the only frequency allowed in Sweden, .


Right now I don't think there will be any more good openings on the 4m band, so I consider the ES-season for closed this year. I worked 31 DXCC. It is more as I hoped for since so far I think only about 55 DXCC can be worked on this band (not shure, if someone knows the exact numbers?).

List of DXCC worked on 4m, season 2020