What can you say other than that about the tropo ducting of December 2019
The month had started off with a nice few contacts on 144MHz FT8 with DK1VC in JO31 and over the next few days a few more PA stations in the near continent (up to the 500 mile range) extending north to OZ1BEF (JO46) and south to ON4POO (JO20) with almost a page of log filled on 3rd Dec. Conditions then stumbled along with occasional contacts made, until it all kicked off on 28th December when I switched the rig on and the first station I copied was D41CV (with the beam not even pointing that way) in HK76 in Cape Verde Islands, 4503km (2800 miles). There's only one thing to say, "I'm going to need a bigger map" !. I actually worked him again some 4 hours later to just prove the path was still open.
From 28th Dec to 1st Jan 2020 it was just ding-dong dx, some 90 stations from SM in the north, Poland in the East to EA8 Canary Islands and D41CV (Cape Verde Islands) to the south
World records were set on this opening on 2m and 70cm which will take some beating.
The month had started off with a nice few contacts on 144MHz FT8 with DK1VC in JO31 and over the next few days a few more PA stations in the near continent (up to the 500 mile range) extending north to OZ1BEF (JO46) and south to ON4POO (JO20) with almost a page of log filled on 3rd Dec. Conditions then stumbled along with occasional contacts made, until it all kicked off on 28th December when I switched the rig on and the first station I copied was D41CV (with the beam not even pointing that way) in HK76 in Cape Verde Islands, 4503km (2800 miles). There's only one thing to say, "I'm going to need a bigger map" !. I actually worked him again some 4 hours later to just prove the path was still open.
From 28th Dec to 1st Jan 2020 it was just ding-dong dx, some 90 stations from SM in the north, Poland in the East to EA8 Canary Islands and D41CV (Cape Verde Islands) to the south
World records were set on this opening on 2m and 70cm which will take some beating.
The cause of this opening was a large high pressure system over central Europe with isobars reaching from the Atlantic off Africa right up to Scandinavia, and in typical style the enhanced propagation occurred across the trailing edge of the pressure system as it moves away east, temperature inversions can be seen on the Skew-T plots and these will have enabled the vhf signals to travel long distances. This was well predicted by Hepburn's charts but also seen on the Met charts and on the Skew-T traces (sudden kinks to the right on the trace). Further reading may be found here e.g. here |