Topband: 40 hours on topband from VK6

[Steve Ireland]

G’day

During the last 40 hours I’ve been giving the band a bit of a workout from VK6. Prior to this, family and work commitments and heaps of unseasonable QRN has made spending time on the band before this pretty difficult. 

Yesterday’s sunrise brought FT4TA peaking at sunrise but unworkable through the huge European pileup for those of us who live around the Indian Ocean/Pacific Rim. 4O3M was an enormous signal here and one of the first Europeans I heard work the FT4. European signals were in for a few minutes and then out again, which seems typical of 160m from here when solar activity is relatively high. However there were enough good signals to make me think I should get up very early (4.30am local time) more regularly to catch the sunrise and some European DX. 

This morning’s hour before sunrise brought poor conditions into Europe from here but similar prop to yesterday from here to FT4TA, who seemingly hadn’t got much prop at this time into Europe either. As a result, the FT4 was in the log at 2105Z and they then went QSX 1822 after to work Japan.  Hope some Japanese and Korean topbanders got in the FT4TA log today!

Tonight the band was open into the south-eastern USA quite nicely for about an hour after VK6 sunset.  Myself and Steve VK6IR had a good time from our QTHs working mainly into AL, NC, VA, plus a few stations further north in WV and PA. Jon AA1K was his usual dependable signal in here. QSB was very heavy and towards the end of the hour signals would pop out of the noise for a few seconds, hit an S5 and then quickly fall back down. This made working stations hard, but by the end of the hour 23 North American stations had made it into the log, including one VE3.

Vy 73

Steve, VK6VZ

 



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