Polar Mesospheric Summer Echoes

"Around the Arctic Circle, VHF radio signals are starting to echo from Earth's upper atmosphere--a phenomenon called 'Polar Mesospheric Summer Echoes.'"

(txt from Southgatearc.org)

I wrote a article about this phenomenon in 2017. One of my goals this year is to make a QSO with Japan on 6m. This is only possible for a few days in a year and so you need to monitor 6m every morning to see when a opening is there....

https://pe4bas.blogspot.com/2017/07/nlcs-pmse-and-sssp.html

ES propagation is already appearing and signals from all over Europe are very strong some days. At my QTH though it takes a bit more to get a DX QSO. I noticed stations in Croatia, Austria and southern Germany did already make QSOs into Japan, Asia, USA, West-Indies, South America and Africa. It seems the further you live south the better propagation on the 6m band is. I sometimes even notice that between PA0O and me, Jaap does live approx. 15km south of me and even at that distance there can be a huge difference in propagation.

So far I managed to work one new 6m DXCC contacting 7X2TT from Algeria.

Aloha, WSPR DXCC nr.92

Thanks to the blog post from John MW1CFN it was known to me that there was a possible good path to Hawaii on 20m WSPR. And since it is not yet in my WSPR DXCC list I was eager to get a report. So I took the opportunity to test the IC-7300 with WSPR for the first time and brought it down easily to 1W WSPR output. When I woke up this morning and checked the WSPR reports on my phone AI6VN/KH6 was on top of my list and gives me WSPR DXCC nr. 92.

Like John wrote on his blog there seems to be a good path on 20m every morning when the greyline passes over the Hawaiian islands. My signal might not that good compared to MW1CFN and also my location is by far not as good. But at least I got 5 spots in total with strongest at 05:56 UTC.

Best feature from JS8call

My personal opinion that the message feature in JS8call is the best feature of all for this digimode software. Above the message received notice from OH8STN Julian after I send him a message a day earlier. The nice thing is that if the station you want to send a message to doesn't have to be on air. You can store the message locally or at another station. As soon as the station appears on the band there is a notice send out that there is a message with a ident number. You can pick it up with the query msg command. How things work exactly can be seen in this video from OH8STN: