50MHz so far in 2023 = good and bad.

I have just had a good morning on 50MHz. That was after a few weeks of sitting here every morning from 05:00 to 11:00 listening and, once or twice, calling. So if I had done this post yesterday the bad would have outweighed the good.

Let us get the bad out of the way first. Hours and hours each morning, day after day, spent hearing nothing. 2023 so far has not been great in the usual sense. There have been no openings for me to US or Canada. And until today, none to Japan. It took ages for the season to get underway.

I began to think that it was already too late to work Japan as the latest I have worked it previously was 7 July.

This morning (at last!) there was a good opening into Japan and I worked 16 JA stations and 5 in South Korea (DS/HL). That all happened in 94 minutes of heavy action before I had to do other things. South Korea was a new country for me on 6m.

Does 94 minutes to work a new DXCC justify all those hours put in over the past couple of months trying to work Asia? Yes, but I cannot deny it has been frustrating.

During all that waiting the question was - is my station deficient? Recently I have been watching other stations within a few hundred km of here working JA almost every day when I could hardly hear them. On close examination these other stations had antennas with about 3dB gain over mine and some more antenna height. However, that did not explain that they could hear these stations 20dB stronger than I did. 

Now that I have worked a few stations in Japan and Korea I can forget about my worries until the next time it matters.

So what have I worked in 2023? More DXCC than ever before - 73 countries. That has brought my all time total on 6m to 96. That sounds pretty good, though it took a lot of effort to do it. Who said it would be easy?

50MHz contacts over 1500km at GM4FVM 1 January to 23 July 2023

The image above looks a lot better today than it would have done yesterday. At last I am getting as far East as I had done South West and South. The relatively few contacts into Africa have been very pleasing for me. That gap into North America looks very glaring, but I have in the past worked in that direction into mid-August. There is still a chance. There is also scope into the Caribbean where Curacao and Bonaire were nice recent captures. There is a lot of work still to do into South America too.

So, of course this 2023 so far map is amazing. Could I have done better? I think so.

Improve my station. Get better at operation. Know when to be active. Marginal gains.

And so it goes on.

73 Jim