[Fourlanders] The wild 6 meter opening

[Rogers, Ron]

Yep.....  typical event just 1 or 2 weekends right before contest !!  I
haven't heard 6 meters this wild in years. 

Both Sat. and Sun I worked up into NE, Midwest, and out West all with my
6 meter vertical dipole !!  And, you should have heard the pileups and
heterodynes on 52.525 FM simplex. It was a blast.......I used only 10
watts to work all over the US on FM.

>From the latest K7RA propagation forecast :

6 meters also can be exciting. Bill Van Alstyne, W5WVO of Rio Rancho,
New Mexico writes, "Sporadic-E season is upon us, and yesterday (Sunday,
May 28) saw one of the best 6-meter North American sporadic-E openings
of the past few years. At one point late Sunday morning, 6 meters was
open coast-to-coast, with QSOs between CA and the east coast via long
double-hop propagation (or maybe triple-hop in some cases) taking place
frequently. Here in New Mexico, I was hearing and working both coasts
and pretty much everything in between with S9+ signals."

Bill continues, "Many stations in the eastern part of the country, and
even out west here, worked a lot of DX in the Caribbean and Central
America, but my path in that direction is poor, and I didn't hear any of
it."

He goes on to say, "I did pick up a number of new grid squares, though,
including EL94 (Florida Keys) on a double-hop path and a cool
backscatter contact with DM34 in central Arizona. Backscatter is unusual
on 6 meter sporadic-E (in my experience). My theory is that a typical
sporadic-E cloud is much more planar a refractive medium than the F2
layer, and doesn't scatter energy as much in off-beam directions. Thanks
to W7MHW for hearing my weak signal through the pile-up of S9+20 signals
from the southeast states."

Bill continues with, "Heard several guys talking about sporadic-E on
2 meters, but I think it was pretty limited. I didn't hear any really
super-short skip on 6 meters; my guess, from the minimum skip distances
I was hearing, is that the Es MUF was somewhere around 100-120 MHz--at
least in these parts."


Ron Rogers 
Eng. Prog. Mgr. 
Elec. Payment & Wireless Sys. 
NCR Corp. 
770-623-7690