Doing the VHF treble

My late Uncle Ernie was a great gambler. He did "trebles". When he gambled, he bet not on one thing happening, but three things happening. Although he would not get regular small winnings, he reckoned his fewer big winning would be more.

He never did win a treble.

Footballers also want to win the "treble", league cup, plus domestic and European championship, or whatever, and score a hat-trick. Trebles are big things.

I though of this when reading "Fouritalia" a news sheet produced by IW0FFK for Four Metre Band (70MHz) enthusiasts in Italy. He included a letter from IZ5ILX describing his VHF activities as "doing the treble".

You can find Fouritalia (in Italian of course) here.

Thanks for that idea for a name. "Doing the Treble" is exactly what I do.

I know that some of you have been sceptical about me running several rigs. Well, that is how I do the treble, and I often do quadruples too.

This is not odd. HF DXers do something similar, moving up and down bands with MUF. But it is different with Sporadic E. With F layer propagation you can get gradual shifts, and just use one rig up and down the HF bands. With the VHF treble you have to jump around, taking your chance as it comes.

Here are some diagrams. You have to take some things for granted. As the radius of the Earth is about 6371km, and the Sporadic E layer is about 100km above that, any scale diagram would either have too little detail or be too wide. So I have tried to get a lot closer to true scale here, but my diagrams are still not flat enough. This makes the angle of radiation looking too high - for real good DX I suggest you use the lowest angle of radiation you can.

You also have to take into account that radio signals do not go a straight lines with parallel sides, but spread out in cone shapes into open space. Hence the inverse square law. I will show them as straight lines for now and say something else  about this later.

Finally, the E layer is shown roughly parallel to the Earth's surface (it almost is, but not always) and the angles by which the signals are sent back to the Earth are symmetrical. This is true as far as it goes, but if you go into more detail you find other variations. For here we stick to "the angle of reflection is equal to the angle of incidence". Relative to the line X-Y on the following diagrams, the signal appears to be bent at the same angle on each side (that is only an illustration too, as the signal appears to be reflected at an imaginary point above the E-layer, but that is not for discussion now).

The actual mechanism is not quite like a mirror would reflect light, as I show it. There are in fact many refractions plus many minor and one major shallow reflection, and there can be a lot of variation. Let us just take the simple analysis for now. Making it more complicated does not help us in a general discussion. There is quite a good explanation in the ARRL handbook and I hope to say more about this later.

This diagram should be pretty familiar (click to enlarge if needs be) ;-

As the level of ionisation increases, radio signals which otherwise pass out into space are able to be bent back down and reach a DX station.

With lower ionisation they pass straight through into space. When increasing ionisation allows propagation to reach the "maximum useable frequency" (MUF) the radio signal will be bent down to the point where it just grazes the earth. This is the maximum distance able to be reached.

The effect of even higher ionisation is best shown in a later diagram. In this diagram it looks as if the ionisation rises until the signal bends down and disappears somewhere in space (actually it stops being refracted). However, you do not usually stop hearing stations. As the ionisation continues to increase you start getting your signal bounced from a point "P" and you get shorter path lengths (but the angle in incidence at P still equals the angle of reflection at P, just the possible angles are different at different levels of ionisation). If you do not understand this for now, just move on and it should become clearer.

So there is a level of ionisation which gives you the best DX you can get, if you fire your signal off at a low angle of radiation. You can exploit this, but as ionisation increases, you get short skip. Any good DX-er then goes up to higher frequencies to get more DX. Not so many stay with short skip (unless they are hunting for squares or nearby countries).

 At this point things begin to get difficult for the diagram as the signals are shown as straight lines. They are not straight lines in real life. They are cones with a point at the tx antenna which expand out and hit the E-layer at slightly different angles. So as the ionisation increases further, you still get signals bounced back over a fairly wide area. But in general, as the ionisation increases the "skip shortens".

Also at this point I start trying to "do the treble". As the ionisation rises, the skip on 6m shortens. But when it reaches a certain level, that means that the ever-increasing MUF reaches 4m. The MUF has risen from 50MHz to 70MHz. Eventually, when the MUF rises very high, the distance I can work on 6m gets even shorter, it gets shorter on 4m and suddenly I can work DX on 2m. The MUF has reached 144MHz.

So I band hop. I watch all three bands. I try to "do the treble".

I watch 6m on DX Maps and see, perhaps, station working between Southern England and Northern Spain. That is quite short skip for 6m, maybe 1000km.  Perhaps I can see MUF prediction on DX Maps showing an Es cloud over the Bay of Biscay. I cannot get into this contact along the line A-B on the diagram above. The 6m skip is too short. I am too far away to reach the end of the path. But I can try changing up to 4m. If the ionisation over the Bay of Biscay will support an MUF of 70MHz I can work into Portugal along the line C-D. And very often, it works. It is actually further than A-B, which I cannot reach anyway.

That is just "doing the double". I still enjoy it. If 2m opens too, I can get along path E-F.

The point is that sitting and waiting on any one band rules out the possibility of watching the MUF rise and the skip length changing on the others. If you listen to silence on 4m, you do not realise that there is an opening which you cannot work on 6m, and you can get into that on the higher band if you swing your beam and just try calling CQ. Yet, despite this being pretty simple well-known stuff, I know VHF operators who sit in hope on 2m watching the world chatting on KST chat line, not realising that they might as well turn their rig off. If they were listening on 6m or 4m (even if their country does not have 4m to transmit on) they might know how the bands are behaving.

So, I am not aimlessly moving about the bands. I can be looking at the MUFs and thinking about the levels of ionisation. Often I can see that the 6m paths are too short for me, and too far away. So I think in terms of higher frequencies, trying to cross the same ionisation spot which I see on the map. Or sometimes I can hear 4m open to strange commercial data stations, but no amateurs. Then I starting wondering if 2m is about to open too.

On 22 June I did the treble. I had worked Slovenia, Slovakia, Romania and Serbia on 6m at about 10:00. However, the skip shortened, and the 6m Es paths were all in Europe and too short for me. Later on 4m I knew that I was being heard in Italy (best not to say how) before 16:00. But the skip on 4m shortened again, and I lost that path. Then I thought and moved to 144MHz and worked IW1CHX, IZ1ESM and I2FAK. When that faded I thought that the 4m skip length had probably lengthened again and dropped back to 4m and worked Slovenia, Southern Germany, Greece and Croatia.

The DX distance of those contacts were all much the same. They involved jumping up and down the three bands. Doing the treble.

The point about this is that while I was working good DX on 6m, I was not going to get anywhere on 4m. Once I knew that I could get DX on 4m then the good DX disappeared on 6m. Eventually when the 4m DX went I could move up to 2m for a short while, and after than 4m was good again. These are the steps and stairs I go up and down regularly.

I am not going to say that this is easy. Unlike F layer DX, you cannot do it easily on one rig. Es can appear very quickly. You might think that Es can just appear on 2m and vanish immediately. I have shown that 2m Es is more easy to find if you follow it up from 6m via 4m and then wait for it. Most of the time it does not come. Sometimes the process is very quick. There is a lot of guessing, but it is informed guesswork.

It is great fun though.

So there are three things I would say about this as some sort of advice.

Firstly, watching paths you cannot reach is a good pointer for finding ones you can. I try to learn the way the bands work that day and follow that.

Secondly, after a band closes, try the one below in frequency and that might now have paths you could not reach before. Never switch off after an event without trying the lower bands or you might miss something.

Finally, try doing "the quadruple". I leave 10m on WSPR all day. I learn from that where the very early and late openings are.

What I am talking about here is "smart working". It will not make a band open if the MUF is not high enough. But I think it gives me the best chance of following the best paths.

73

Jim
GM4FVM

Aurora and Es email warnings and more solar activity

First of all, I am pleased with this ...

Stavros is a real gent. He had the patience to deal with awkward conditions and everybody else stood aside and waited. The amateur spirit remains alive and well in some places anyway. To begin with it was scratchy, but once we got going the frequency cleared and it was quite easy in the end.

There was an aurora last night, but at 03:00 local times, which is not ideal for me or the rest of Europe.

The Nordic magnetometer stackplot looked interesting yesterday  ...

 ... and the satellite based GOES magnetometer detected another solar event which looks likely to make today and tomorrow interesting too ...

Time will tell whether anything else happens and if it is not at 03:00 - a time when good citizens of this part of the world are firmly asleep in their scratcher.


Now, I have signed up to get Es warning emails with titles like this...

Thu 1459 UTC: 70 MHz E-skip Alert - 4 m Band open from CS5BALG to F4CXO on 70159.0 kHz

Inside the email is a link to a cluster site with Es reports. This handy service is offered by Allard, PE1NWL. You can sign up at his site "GoodDX - the home of the DX Robot". I think it is a great idea and I would not be without it - but I need to turn it off if I am away from the shack otherwise I get annoyed by what I might be missing.

OK, sometimes they are not so effective - they are triggered by the early contacts of an opening and maybe not representative of what comes later, but that is not the point. They just alert you to what is happening.

It takes a couple of contacts before they are activated, as you do get 40 metre band contacts posted on the 4 metre band cluster by mistake. And that one above is a French listener hearing a Portuguese beacon, which is interesting but maybe not what points the way to conditions here. Still, I like them.

I also sometimes get things like this ...

Sun 1223 UTC: 70 MHz E-skip Alert - 4 m Band open from CS5BALG/B to GM4FVM on 70159.0 kHz

I knew about that one. More often they are QSOs rather than beacon reports.

The DX Robot also does aurora warnings and you can choose whether you only want high latitude ones (if you are fairly far North) or lower latitude ones (say, in England or further South). At 56N my QTH is a bit borderline [in many ways]. I did choose to get the high latitude warnings even though that means I get warnings for openings which really only affect Nordic stations. It is good to be alerted. Their titles look like this ...

Tue 0123 UTC: VHF AURORA WARNING

Once again in the text of the email you have a link to the GoodDX site and their aurora listings.

Well, I find them useful anyway.

73

Jim
GM4FVM

Excellent VHF Sporadic E and attic antenna.

I was just reading an article which states that the peak Es days are usually one month on either side of the Summer Solstice (the longest day of the year, usually 21 June, but sometimes 22 June). Not the Solstice itself, which they say is not good for Es.

We just had probably the biggest Es event since  I moved to this QTH 8 years ago and it occurred on  ... the Summer Solstice. Yesterday (21 June) and into today (22 June), there was a prolonged opening on VHF. Up here it did not reach 2 metres, even though I hoped it might. Nevertheless, it did good work on 10m, 6m and 4m.

I say "biggest" because by one standard it exceeded what I have heard here before. It was a bit surprising as it was not the dramatic "point-to-point" opening so loved on VHF enthusiasts (meaning me). You know, the band is sound asleep and you decide to call CQ and some exotic DX station pops up, works you , and then the band closes again. Crazy, I know, but that is one of the things I like about VHF Es.I recall several on FM where the Dx operator was really someone wanting a chat across town, only to find this crazy Scotsman trying to call them. You can hear the shock in their voice.

No, it was a slow burn. I was a sitting here in the shack working hard on something. I have been here for about a week grafting away on a schedule for something and it really has needed concentration - with the rigs on the background of course.

In the run up to this event, 17 June produces exactly nothing. After working 9H1 as anew country the day before I expected nothing. USUALLY, you do not get two good days on Es after each other ...

18 June started as just a normal day. EA3GNA and EA6ZS on 6m PSK, and LN1V on 4m meteor scatter during the Nordic Activity Contest that evening.

However, at 21:50 I worked EA4BPN and EA5XA on 6m JT65, followed by EA4SG and EA3/ON5VW on 4m SSB. This latter contact, working Marc at 23:12 clock time, was a nice new square - JN12 - but strange so late in the evening.

Next morning, 19th, it was back to the project. It was good to work EA5/G3XGS on 6m JT65. I have seen XGS appear frequently on the cluster on 4m meteor scatter though this was the first time I have worked him (so far).

Nothing else. And on 20 June, nothing at all.

Somehow it seems to build up. I know that with random numbers you think you see a pattern, but I just have this feeling that Es seems to charge and discharge, but surely that cannot be right.

The Solstice started as usual, well as usual as a day with 17 hours and 25 minutes of daylight can do. It just does not get dark on the night of the Solstice, or for a week on either side.

CT4RC called me on 6m JT65 but I lost him. Then I worked HA6ZB on 4m SSB at 11:00, then CT1HZE in a contest  on 4m SSB at 13:38. Those are what you would expect on point-to-point days. Then a strange contact with GW4RBR, during which he rose from about 57 to 59. I was beaming South, so was he. If I beamed towards him (South West) he disappeared. The signal had fast fluttery QSB. Some sort of back scatter, I thought, but back scatter from what?

Then, at 15:55, the bands opened. I started on 6m, moved to 4m, and then back to 6m. At times, 4m was like 20m on a bad day. There were stations EVERYWHERE, with several on top of each other or 500Hz apart.

I worked Austria (1), Slovenia (3), Hungary (2), Germany (7), Poland (4), Croatia (1), Czech Republic (1). At one stage I had to go to eat, and I said to Mrs FVM, "this will be over now", but it was still going. And then there was another late opening after 21:49 when I went onto 6m JT65 and worked Poland, France (2), Spain and (on JT9) Italy. Last contact was at 22:42, and at 15 minutes to midnight clock I went to bed.

I have never heard 4m so busy. Gradually more and more countries have got access to the band. At the moment Italy is not on, which is a pity, but to have added more stations would have proved that we really do not have enough space on 70 MHz! I never thought I would say that.

The one respect it was better than before was the appearance of SV3BSF in KM08. I have never worked Greece on 4m, and I had almost thought that it could not be done. However, he was 59 for a long period, and then returned at 59 about an hour later. I could not get through the pileup to reach him. He heard me, but then another station with a similar callsign called him and I lost my chance. Never mind, some other time. But it proves it can be done. Macedonia is another target, but I did not hear that on 4m even though there was a station on the band on both days.

While I was on 4m, I put 6m WSPR on and it was quite a day on that too ...

Now, that is a proper 6m WSPR map.

And to cap all that, 10m was open almost all night. I recorded over 150 spots overnight, from all over Europe.

"They" say that the Solstice is not a good day to look for Es, and they are wrong. Random numbers are a great subject for conspiracy theories. People talk about "lucky" shops to buy lottery tickets, or lucky numbers. Well, in my view 21 June is as good a day as any other for Es.

And then it went on into 22 June. From 09:30 to 10:30 I worked Slovenia, Croatia, Slovakia, and Romania on the usual mix of 4m/6m SSB/JT65/PSK. So much for my own idea that Es does not work two days in a row .. and on 6m WSPR Gianfranco IU1DZZ plus IK1WVQ, OH3LMN and HB9TJM have been coming in all day on 22 June. HUGE signals at times.

The K number is now 5 and it looks like an aurora could follow. Isn't this great? More on that later. It might never happen, but that would just crown a great couple of days.

In this business you have days with nothing, and then days when you are snowed under. But not usually two days in a row, or could this be a 48 hour continuous opening?

= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =
EDIT - before I posted this, and still on 22 June, I worked IW1CHX, IZ1ESM and I2FAK on 2m. It has been such a long time since there was a good Es opening from here. Years.
EDIT EDIT - since then I worked SV1BGR (KM18VA 2760km). And I thought it wasn't possible on 4m from here, and then as I missed it yesterday I might have a long wait. It was on 70.170, the unofficial German calling frequency, but everybody behaved perfectly and waited until we had finished. And Stavros was very patient - though the QSO went perfectly.
EDIT EDIT EDIT - and I worked DL1PN for a new 4m square and S51RM and 9A6Z and 6m WSPR is still blasting away and the aurora has started, and it is STILL 19:30 on 22 June.
= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =

Oh yes, during 21 June I had the attic antenna running with the Flex on 15m WSPR. I was heard in the US, but it radiates North-South so not much happened. However good the Solstice is for VHF, it does nothing at all for HF. I need to try 15m in the Autumn and 40m in the Winter.

It was amazing to watch - WSPR on 15m, 10m and 6m, on three rigs, and the fourth rig on 4m with pile ups in all directions. Do I need all this? Probably not. Am I enjoying it? Certainly.

Cheap rigs. Buy a couple and forget the expensive machinery. Yes, I know some will disagree, but I love it.

73

Jim
GM4FVM

I am not competitive ....

I do not really try for records or radio awards. I do not enter contests, though I do oblige a few people who ask for points. So I come on to VHF contests and give away my IO85 square, or this "rare" TD post code. I do not have any certificates, though I do have a laugh watching my eQSL prefix total mount up.

What I do challenge myself with is trying to eke the best performance out of the ionosphere.

To this end, I managed to work LY2BAW (KO25 1694km) on 14 June for a definite new 4 metre band country. This SSB contact puts to bed my doubts over LY/OH5LID on FSK441 mode back on 30 April. I do not know if Lithuanian stations are limited to CW and SSB on 4m, but it does not matter now. And it counts for another new square too. You have to be very watchful as LY only has 70.240 to 70.250 for SSB. I tried 70.242 for hours before finally netting LY2BAW.

There have been a couple of good Es openings on VHF at last. As yet none of the typical "large cloud over the Baltic and North Sea" type which gets me into Finland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark (well, Bornholm mostly), Estonia, Eastern Germany and Poland. There have been a few short openings into Poland and that one to Lithuania, but otherwise nothing in that direction at 70MHz. I worked LY again on 6 metres though. No OIRT broadcast stations heard on 70MHz.  Nothing West either, so I have missed USA, Canada, Azores, Madeira and Iceland (pretty wide range there, and Madeira would be a new one too). I have worked Madeira on some band - must check.

Lithuania have managed to squeeze a 70MHz amateur segment in between 70MHz broadcast stations. Very clever. Mind you, power is limited to 22W EIRP. If only places like Latvia, Belarus and Moldova could do the same. I know that it depends on exactly where their broadcast stations fall in the band, but it should be possible. Even if the result fell slightly outside the main European amateur band and involved split working, it would be interesting.

I wonder how my neighbours would react if I started running 22W EIRP on 99.7MHz? Frankly, as most of them either ...
(a) don't listen to the radio anyway, or
(b) if they do use DAB digital bands, or
(c) listen to podcasts on their tablet computers, or
(d) they use radio reception on satellite or Freeview digital TV systems ...
me running in between broadcast stations might go without notice.

The only places I hear 88-108MHz FM broadcast stations now are in the barbers, garage workshops or building sites. Nobody seems to listen at home.

I was also able to work S50B on 4 metres, which was good as Borut has read this blog. It is always nice to contact you all, the readers.

I have been busy on 6m, though there has been nothing really exciting on there. I have been on JT65, reeling them in. Lots of new squares but no new countries. On 6 metres JT65 I am often joined by Duncan MM0GZZ (IO85uu) and Alisdair MM0XAB (IO85wv). They are both within a 5km radius of me. Will anybody want to work 3 stations so close? So I tend to move to PSK, which is interesting too. No problems with that at all.

There was a good Es VHF opening yesterday (16 June). I was working in the shack, keeping an eye on the area covered by Es getting closer, as shown by dxMaps. My first contact was IK6GZM (JN62 1824km) on 6m JT65 at 16:41. I had a really helpful spot that I had been received on 4m on Sardinia, which is getting close to Malta and on the same bearing from here. I could work out that as 9H1CG was on 4 metres, so it should be possible to work him at some stage. Malta would be a new country for me on 4m. However, I decided that somebody else could do that for a GM-9H 4m "first" and I would have my dinner instead. Not competitive, me?

I returned from tea 45 minutes later to see that a couple of other GM stations had worked 9H1CG, so I joined the queue and worked him (JM75 2544km). After changing to 6m PSK I worked IK5GQK (JN53 1019). Then I returned to 4m SSB to work EA3GP (JN01 1024), 9H1BT (JM75 2550). I watched some television and returned briefly to work EA7HG (IM87 1251) at 20:21. Now you see why I use separate rigs for each band, I use one and look for chances on the other.

That was a pretty busy evening.

My Flex 1500 has returned from Norbert fully restored. He returned it after less than 48 hours. Excellent service.

Various components have been replaced including the antenna socket, the audio socket and it has been re-turfed to UK+ status, which gives me the full UK tx coverage up to 52MHz.

It seems the tx fault was down to overvoltage on the D9 socket, and it may be my mistake. I do not really understand why this went wrong, but maybe we shall never know. I fear that one of the pins on the D9 socket have been grounded, bridged or had over voltage, but I cannot really understand why or how. Never mind, let us move on.

I set the Flex up on the 40m attic dipole and let it run over night. Power was 200mW running WSPR. As this would the fourth installation of WSPR on my computer, I decided to load WSPR-X instead. WSPR-X has a different look and feel, and has the bonus of having WSPR-15, a mode for VLF (!).

As I do not use the PowerSDR waterfall overnight, and it is not much help on 40m anyway, I put the WSPR waterfall in the middle of the Power SDR screen instead (you can just see WSPR2.21 running below WSPR-X on 10 metres).

As usual, click on the image to enlarge if you wish.

Overnight I was looking for tx spots at a reasonable distance for 200mW. I had 16 spots from RZ6AOJ near Krasnodar on the Black Sea between 22:14 and 02:36 - 2941km. Then I had 11 spots from WA4AMG in Florida between 00:52 and 05:16. That is 6810km, and the best report was -11dB. That report means that he should have heard me if I was running only 10mW. There were also 4 spots from K3EA, 2 from KB1FY and 1 from K4HKX. Thanks for all the spots folks.

I think that was not a bad performance for 200mW and an attic dipole at just about the worst day for 40m in the year. I mean, we are near the Summer Solstice, and 40m tends to be a Winter band. Thanks to Bri and GF for suggesting that I should stick with the attic dipole. I would have put it outdoors, but keeping it in the loft and running 200mW seems to work.

Of course I heard a lot more stations, many using 10-14dB more power than I was.

So, there is something to keep me busy during the Winter.

73

Jim
GM4FVM

Sporadic E during the night.

Es is generally known as a daytime phenomenon.

This is not unexpected as it is caused by radiation from the Sun ionising layers in the ionosphere.

Bearing in mind that I am located at 56 degrees North, Es is an even more brief event than it would be further South where the Sun is more often overhead. Or, more accurately, more often overhead wherever the signals meet the E layer.

So I have to exploit it whenever I can.

At times of high daytime ionisation, it is possible for Es to occur quite late on into the evening, even up here. The usual times predicted in the books are something like "late morning" (here about 11:00 to 14:30) and early evening (18:00 to 20:00). Certainly nothing overnight.

My VHF Es contacts over the past few days showed the vague pattern from the books - 7 June 50Mhz 12 to 13h, 8 June 70MHz 14:30 and 17:00, 9 June 70 MHz 12:30 to 15h, and then slightly out of order 9 June 50MHz around 16h.

As you might expect on 10 June there was ABSOLUTELY NOTHING ALL DAY - even every little on 28Mhz. They don't call it sporadic for nothing. There are days when nothing happens at any specific location. There might be things happening somewhere else, even quite close, but that is not much help.

OK, so we move on to 11 June. There was nothing much until about 17h, when I had to go out. I returned just after 18:45 and worked EA2ARD on 50MHz JT65 when he was a huge signal, and then I worked Gianfranco, IU1DZZ at 18:50.

If you need any proof that Sporadic E is a fleeting thing, after working Gianfranco the band closed in a matter of moments.

You can see on the waterfall the JT65 signal of F1MWV who went from big red mark to zero in a few seconds at about 18:56:20. It was like shutting a door. Signals that had been strong vanished in seconds. This is just an image of what VHF enthusiasts know very well: paths come quickly and they goes just as fast. You have to be a sharp operator to use them. I wish I was.

With the JT65 waterfall you can watch the band opening. In the middle of a transmission, you can watch another station rise out of the noise, and then possibly fall back into it later. Astounding. I am working on a posting about data modes. Well, several postings the way I ramble on about things.

Incidentally, the wideband mark further up the waterfall is me calling CQ on 70MHz.

So that might have been it, and certainly for most purposes the 6m band closed at 18:56.

I did work one station after this. I6WJB called me and this QSO resulted.

He gave me a report of -19, even after I upped my power to 75 watts. We made it all right but afterwards I wondered why this station was so strong and stable for a long period when the band seemed closed. I gave him -03dB, but he gave me -19dB. Was I really 16dB weaker with him than he was with me? Then I looked him up on QRZ.com and discovered he was running 1000W and has a good antenna system. I am sure his home-built receiver is very sensitive - he uses a 6m transverter, and we all know how good they can be (or so I keep saying repeatedly).

There is no doubt that loads of power and good antennas can get you through in this way, in a mixture of ionoscatter, troposcatter, meteor scatter and a bit of low-ionisation Sporadic E. It rather defeats the purpose of looking for Sporadic E, as I don't think that is what it was.

All that proves is that VHF is less "line of sight" than some people say. In the days before the military discovered they could use satellites, they routinely worked over long distances using high power VHF scatter modes.

I upped the power to 75 watts, but I did not have time to update my comment that I was running 25 watts (which was what I started with). One drawback of JT65 is that you do not have much time to compose your comments.. You have to prepare them in advance - 14 characters max taking a minute to send - and save them. That is why most folks don't bother with them at all. So I6WJB was not expecting me to send this cryptic message and he re-sent his 73 message. So that was a waste of time - it was wrong, and he did not understand it anyway.

JT65 was devised as a slow moon-bounce mode. It is not ideally suited to Sporadic E. It works well with if you have 6 minutes of stable conditions. It is good fun though.

Anyway, night time Es is not uncommon at this time of year. This takes two forms up here in the North, the first one is polar-type Es, further to the North of me. The polar stuff makes sense as the concept of "night time" is a bit crazy when you have constant daylight North of the Arctic Circle. Secondly there is residual Es carried over from daytime ionisation, which is in the usual directions (South from me).

There seemed to be a bit of Polar Es around, as someone posted on the DX Cluster that he was hearing the 6m beacon on Jan Mayen Island. I couldn't hear it then, but I often can during Polar Es events.

Recalling IU1DZZ reporting overnight Es a few nights ago on 10m, I decided to leave WSPR running overnight on 6m and 10m. I sometimes do this during the height of the Es season. At first there were a lot of spots from Finland and Norway. But after 02:00 it settled down to silence for almost two hours. Then ...

2015-06-12 05:42	IK1WVQ	28.126071	-23	0	JN44cb	+33	1.995	GM4FVM	IO85wu	1502	933
2015-06-12 04:48	IU1DZZ	28.126137	-19	0	JN45hk	+37	5.012	GM4FVM	IO85wu	1381	858
2015-06-12 04:42	OH7AZL	28.126145	-22	0	KP33on	+33	1.995	GM4FVM	IO85wu	1832	1138
2015-06-12 04:20	OH7AZL	28.126145	-20	0	KP33on	+33	1.995	GM4FVM	IO85wu	1832	1138
2015-06-12 04:18	GM4FVM	28.126110	-24	0	IO85wu	+27	0.501	OH7AZL	KP33on	1832	1138
2015-06-12 04:08	OH7AZL	28.126146	-28	0	KP33on	+33	1.995	GM4FVM	IO85wu	1832	1138
2015-06-12 03:54	OH7AZL	28.126145	-23	0	KP33on	+33	1.995	GM4FVM	IO85wu	1832	1138

I have seen it busier than this, but it does show that the wee small hours are still capable of providing Sporadic E.

All this is me trying to show that my single day on HF - 24 hours on 7MHz - does not indicate any my intention to sit up overnight and work on the low bands. There is still plenty to do for me on VHF, even overnight. 40 metres is just a bit of playing around for me. It is interesting, but it will have to wait for a time when there is not a pile of things for me to do on VHF.

73

Jim
GM4FVM