At last some tropo --- and records broken too.

When I am fortunate to work some notable DX, I always wonder why. This is not just looking for some technical explanation, but why now? Why not before? And also --- If I can get so far, why cannot I reach other places at that distance?

This is particularly so recently when I had a contact with LY2WR on 1296MHz in KO24. This was a total distance of 1726km, when my best previous DX on this band was just 1000km.

This contact shows that I can do much better on 23cm than I had previously thought. And the proper contaxt for that statement has to be - I had already been doing much better on 23cm than I ever epected when I started out on that band. Honestly, I had expected a few contacts up to a few hundred km.

The club station at LY2WR is not what I regard as a "superstation". In fact they have similar antennas to mine and they are running 100W and me running 150W, therefore we are both in the "middling" category. This was a notable contact for me, as I pointed out at the time on the microwave section of the KST chat room. The response from LY2WR was to thank me for their first GM of the day. FIRST GM OF THE DAY!!! My first LY on 70cm EVER. Thank you very much.

Just to see how this compares with my previous results on 23cm I created a map of all my 23cm contacts since I started on the band which were more than 600km ....

All 1296MHz contacts at GM4FVM over 600km

As usual click to enlarge images if needs be.

The contact with LY2WR is in a different league compared to the others. It takes 600km for me to reach continental Europe, and than after that most contacts are spread around up to 1000km which looked like a definite boundary.

Then along came that LY2WR contact. The question arose -- where else could 1700km take me for new DXCC? Well Poland for a start. Austria. Czech Republic. Lithuania. Latvia. ????

Maybe those ideas are a bit of wishful thinking. Looking at the path to LY2WR, most of it is over water  -first the North Sea and then the Baltic Sea. I printed out the path and crossing Denmark met with a maximum hill height of 100m, and crossing Sweden the terain was only 150m asl. Those favourable conditions would not really apply if I had to cross the land mass of Northern Europe with its many mountains.

Still, I can dream.

Actually, that sort of diatance might bring me near Spain and Portugal, also a mostly sea path. That is a path I have exploited on the lower bands, and it worked then despite the hills in England and Wales in that direction.

That record breaking LY contact was during a tropospheric opening which lasted at GM4FVM from 17 to 21 September. It has been a terrible year for weather here in South East Scotland. Our apple crop will be poor, the tomatoes have failed to ripen in the greenhouse. Put simply there has been a lack of sunlight.

I put this down to a absence of high pressure systems. This has been true almost all year, but especially in Autumn when such systems usually come in off the Atlantic and are blocked over the North Sea. In previous years we often have had excellent conditions across into Europe lasting for days until the high pressure wanders off or fills in. Anyway, on 17 September my spell of bad fortune finally ended.

I have a composite map of all bands during the period. 6m contacts show with orange pins (only one of those), the 54 2m contacts have red pins, the 51 70cm contacts have darker purple pins, and the 17 23cm contacts have light blue pins. You can see that GM4FVM, who is colour blind, wrote that bit, but even I with my Daltonism can just about see the differences.

All contacts at GM4FVM 17 to 21 September 2024

On this map 70MHz contacts do not show any pin. There were just two of these. One was tropo and the other was a meteor scatter contact which was particularly interesting. This was with SM4POB in that small segement of the 4m band avialable to Swedish amateurs under special licences. It was of course a new square for me, and also for Per. I tend to forget that although IO85 includes the city of Edinburgh, it can be a hard one to reach. It was a great pleasure to work easily into Sweden on meteor scatter, not during a shower and at 18:00. This rather daft idea I keep reading that outside a shower you need to be on the band at 06:00 is nonsense. Of course it helps that 4m is a superb band for meteor scatter, but the same rules apply elsewhere too. Thanks Per.

Apart from that one meteor scatter contact and the 6m one with UT7UA (which was Es), all of these QSOs were via troposhperic propagation. As well as the higher bands there was also some tropo on 4m, where I worked DK8WK. I also might have worked some 4m tropo in the shape of some G stations who I heard. I could not find a microphone which fitted the Anytone FM radio, so that one did not work out. Imagine how crazy you must be to file away your microphones in a box with a "MICROPHONES" label on the front and then not be able to find the right one in there. I have found it now of course, but what use is it when the G stations are long gone.

Lots of these 125 contacts were very pleasurable. Lots of old friends and great DX. I cannot really list them all here, but it might be worth considering the pattern on the various bands as set out below.

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50MHz

1 contact, best DX UT7UA, KO20, 1891km

70MHz

2 contacts, best DX SM4POB, JP70, 1176km

144MHz

54 contacts, best DX SP5JK, KO02, 1542km

432MHz

51 contacts, best DX SQ4MIK, JO94, 1383km

1296MHz

17 contacts, best DX LY3WR, KO24, 1726km.

Total

125 contacts, 48 squares, 14 DXCC

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It is not often that my best tropo DX is on 23cm. Apart from that one Es QSO, my greatst distance was that one new record for me. And a new country, LY, bringing my 23cm total to 13 DXCC. It was a good time for 70cm too, psuhing me past 100 squares, in fact rasing my total from 98 to 105. On 432MHz I was also close to a record DX when I worked SQ4MIK in JO94, a distance of 1383km. Piotr just missed out on being a record due to my previous contacts into EA, possibly due to a slightly more tricky path to Poland.

It might be worth noting that during the period 17 to 21st I was in fact away from home for lunchtime on 19 and away all day on 20 September. What could I have worked if I had stayed at my post?

An autumn tropo opening is always a wonderful thing to behold. I manage to attract pile-ups while at the same time breaking new personal best records. There is nothing special that I do, I cannot boast about it when it is the troposphere which is making the difference. It is just another wonder of the world.

I cannot wait for the next one.

73 Jim

GM4FVM