Topband: Yesterday's amazing JA opening

[John Kaufmann]

Nobody seems to have mentioned it here so I will.  In the Northeast USA, we had an exceptional opening to JA around our sunrise yesterday morning local time (Thursday).

I first got on just after 1130Z.  The QRN was almost at summertime levels but I heard a big pileup of signals calling somebody on around 1822.  I listened and some of them were quite loud.  And then I realized they are all JA's.  And they are all calling VE1ZZ!  Jack was running JA's.  

I tuned up to 1824 and I heard JA's calling W8JI.  I almost never hear the JA's that Tom works but this time they were Q5.  I moved down the band and tried some CQ's.  Finally around 1150Z I started getting answers, first from JS2LGN, then JH0BBE.  The propagation held up until a few minutes after sunrise (1215Z) with JA2PJC being the last JA worked.  Interestingly the JA signals were all skewed west.  I remember JA1BWA and JA1BRK being exceptionally loud.

Meanwhile I heard K1ZM running JA's down around 1812.  W1MK also had a run going.  Working any JA's from W1, let alone running them, has been a rare event the last few years, so this is truly exceptional.  

One tipoff to the great propagation was the JA BC beacon on 3925 kHz.  It was very loud yesterday morning.  I usually use it as an 80-meter indicator, but over the years I've found it also correlates strongly with 160 propagation to JA.  The North Korean BC beacon on 2850 was also super strong.  The solar indices were OK, but nothing exceptional.  As I recall the A was around 12 and K was 1.

This morning (Friday) there was nothing and the beacons were rather weak.

See you all in the CQ160 contest next week.  I'll be doing a multi-op from KC1XX.

73, John W1FV