Topband: PJ2T on 160 Meters: Europe Before Sunset

[Jeff Maass]

Prior to the CQWW 160 CW Contest at PJ2T, I set up a portion of our CW Skimmer system, and
let it run. This was using three SDR-IQ receivers fed to a single Dell M6500 laptop
running three instances of CW Skimmer Version 1.4.

I noted that Europe spots started flowing in over an hour before twilight began on
Curacao. The photo below of the laptop screen at 2147Z on January 27 shows the three
instances of Skimmer, the right two using our 1000-foot Europe Beverage and the one on the
left on our 580-foot US/JA Beverage.
 
http://www.k8nd.com/Radio/CW_Skimmer/PJ2_Europe_B4_Sunset_6721.jpg

Remember, this is from 12-degrees North of the Equator, in the bright Caribbean sunshine
and with ~85 degF temperatures! I wasn't able to get any stations to hear me this early,
but we could hear them!

During the contest, twilight at PJ2T came 30 minutes after the contest began, and full
darkness came almost 1.5 hours into the contest period. We did not work our first mainland
European station (EA7SG) until 0024Z, almost 2.5 hours into the contest. At the beginning
of the contest, Europeans are feeding on themselves, and not listening outside. We've
learned to point our receiving antennas at North America for the first few hours of the
contest, as twilight moves slowly across the USA and Canada.

73, Jeff  K8ND