On Mon, Jun 11, 2007 at 02:08:13PM -0000, John Geiger wrote:
> I cannot comment on 2m and above, since I was limited to 6 meters during this
> contest, but these were some of the worst conditions I have seen for a June
> contest, and I have been on 6 since 1992.
I agree - it was by far the worst six meter propagation I've experienced
in the 10 years I've done this contest.
> We only had 2 very short Eskip openings that I caught-one saturday night
> around 0300z to Utah, which lasted about 20 minutes, and one Sunday night
> from 0115Z to around 0215Z to MD, VA, OH, PA, KY, and IL. Other than that,
> just meteor pings and very short Es bursts.
>From STX, we had very thin openings (probably less than 15 QSOs total - I
don't have the log in front of me to double-check) to Florida in the first
hour of the contest, and in the evening to UT, CO, and CA. On Sunday,
I had a few random QSOs that I think were Eskip to the northeast (OH, VA,
WI), including one freakishly long distance QSO into Maine. The stations
at the other end of these QSOs were almost all big contest stations. About
0030 UTC, the band began to open up a little to the northeast, at first
very spotlight into eastern OH and western PA, and then spreading out in
both directions. The last two hours of the contest had great propagation,
bringing in 2/3 of our QSO total and total multipliers on the band, covering
everything in single hop distance from the Dakotas down to Georgia.
Interestingly, as the coverage area grew, it grew in both azimuthal
directions from the stating point about evenly. I guess that means the
E cloud was travelling on a path directly toward or away from our QTH, or
was stationary and growing.
But, basically, we had two hours of propagation in a contest where we can
usually expect 10 or more hours of good propagation.
> I was happy that I could give out EM05 to a couple of people, but of course
> the band opened much better once I got back to my home grid. Hope others had
> better conditions there.
>
> 73s John AA5JG/R (EM04 EM05 EM14 EM15)
>
>
> John Geiger AA5JG
> Associate Professor of Psychology-Cameron University
> ex: W5TD, NE0P, N0EEN, KA0IFG
>
> 6M WAS #1275, 6m VUCC #1260 (400 grids)
> Confirmed 6 meter addict
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--
Kenneth E. Harker WM5R
kenharker@kenharker.com
http://www.kenharker.com/
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