Les Rayburn, N1LF wrote:
I noticed that the skip on 6 meters kept getting
shorter, and on a hunch, I tuned the 910H to
144.200mhz. The band was quite, but the noise level
started to rise as I listened. Then suddenly I heard a
station calling very loudly....
"CQ, CQ, CQ This is Kilo Zero Kilo Echo in Delta Mike
Seven Nine!" I almost fell out of my chair! In a near
panic, I shouted my callsign and grid square into the
microphone. With a great deal of surprise, I heard him
come right back to me.
***************************
Les, the joys of 2M E are many - congratulations.
6M 'shortening' IS a sign of possible 2M E, as the
ionization gets denser. BUT - the trick is to look at
WHERE the path is getting short. What you want to see
is very short skip centered at some distance from your
QTH (500-600 miles ??). Your goal is to then beam at
that refraction point on 2M, this working *through*
that dense cloud. If 6 gets real short to/from YOUR
location, some other fortunate soul will be taking
advantage of it, not you - you are too close. What
you probably had was ANOTHER dense cloud half way
between your QTH and DM79.
This same concept can be used on 6M by monitoring 10M
E paths. Using the end-point maps available at
vhfdx.net allows one to visualize the E clouds and get
a better handle on where the band *might* be open to.
Fun stuff, for sure !
jay W9RM
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