Friday, July 9, 2021

Huge 6m opening to USA @ 8 July

 


An incredible transatlantic opening on 50MHz yesterday evening till 02:00 local time in the morning. Made several QSOs to the USA and my second SSB contact to that area. Best DX heard was W6UC from California (+8800km). Both 50.313 and 50.323 were packed with signals. To make contacts you could only try picking the strongest signals which were into the + dB figures. To find a empty spot in the waterfall was not possible. Although best chance was above 3000Hz. However, there are still not many able to listen there. My advice to those that use FT8: set your filtering as wide as possible. I listen 3600Hz wide as always. To transmit there you definitely need CAT control and configure JTDX or WSJT-X using "fake split".

6 comments:

Paul Stam PAØK said...

Hallo Bas, en dat om 2 uur 's nachts. Niet te geloven, dat maakt 6 meter zo'n bijzondere band. Bedankt voor de filtering advies. 73 Paul

PA2RF said...

Wow !

Photon said...

It was indeed great Es time yesterday. 2m also wild. I got about as far on 6m as you seem to have done, but my antenna is not so amazing. From now on, I'll be concentrating on 6m and 2m, possibly also 4m.

PE4BAS, Bas said...

Hello John, 4m would be nice. It is still not explored much. I saw some activity yesterday but most was from the central part of the netherlands to germany. What is occuring to me is that I see many aircraft scatter traces on 70MHz, VE3VN wrote an article about it lately, very interesting. Actually I had more luck on 4m last year. The band didn't really open for me yet. Might be different in the next weeks. 73, Bas

Jan, OZ9QV said...

Even if I did not work any NA stations on 6m (only using a V-2000 vertical), my reception map was only a bit less impressive than yours.
Indeed the wildest 6m opening to NA in the Es season I have seen. F2 in earlier cycles were, of course more interesting, but we do not have any solar maximum, so here we go.
73 de Jan.

PE4BAS, Bas said...

This year is incredible Jan. I don't know if solar minimum has something to do with the propagation on 6m and 4m. It seems other mechanisms are causing this. But what exactly is not really clear to us. One thought is that it has something to do with climate change as well. Actually I'm very curious what the future brings but only time will tell. I've been on 6m as well a few years ago in the last solar maximum but can't remember propagation was as good as it is this season. 73, Bas