Propagation giveth ...

Propagation giveth and propagation taketh away. 

In the 21 days since my last posting here I have worked 220 stations. That is about 11 contacts per day.

That hardly describes what has been happening. I do not make 11 contacts every day, and it would be boring if I did.

Instead what happens is that there are hours of nothing happening followed by short spells of intense activity. The radios are on for most of the day while I come and go from the shack while building a Metcalfe cardboard kit. Each time I return I take massive punts on whether I need to be in there or not.

For most of the time the screens and maps are blank, or filled with "local" traffic. Some of this local traffic has to be of interest to me. Some of these people want to to work IO85, though it is not a rare square. To keep me active in these areas I try to keep my annual DXCC list ticking over. This involves me chasing countries in Europe and all over the world. Places like Guernsey and Wales can be as hard to work from here each year as some more exotic "once in a career" places.

So I keep active but there are still long very quiet gaps. 70MHz can be particularly quiet, but then it is only on 70MHz that I really see Sporadic E in action. 4m also keeps me on track to working 144MHz Es. Without 4m Es I would never be ready or pointing in the right direction for 2m Es. Having said that, I have missed all the 2m Es this season, though not for radio reasons.

I am not complaining about the quiet periods. I just want to make it clear that it is not a free-for-all at this time of year. I am happy - if I wanted 20m activity levels I would go on to 20m. No chance of that happening, is there?

For a lot of the time, DXMaps can look like this:-

70MHz DX Maps seen at GM4FVM with  no activity at 10:27 local time on 16 June 2023

Not much point clicking on this image to enlarge, but you can if you like.

It can be like that for long periods. 50MHz might show more activity, but often nothing reaching GM4FVM. It is amazing how small the DX searchlight can be, and how it seems to shine somewhere else.

Some things seems fairly certain. When dealing with a random feature, like where the DX stations are to be found, these factors seems pretty constant. The basic rules (excluding tropo) are:-

1) wherever DX is workable is now, it will not be soon

2) whatever happens this morning will not happen again the same way this afternoon

3) whatever happens today will not happen the same way tomorrow.

So whilst this means that if things are good now you cannot count on that later, at the same time if things are bad now they will be better later. The thing you don't know is how long "later" might be. That what creates the frustration fun.

The opportunities are generally divided into morning and afternoon sessions, and these are repeated tomorrow. So there are gaps overnight and around the middle of the day. At peak summer you get third evening session.

With tropo you tend to get a morning session and then later afternoon into evening and especially around and after sundown. Tropo openings can last for several days. This year tropo openings have been rare anyway. The much more stable pattern on tropo only goes to show how different Es, TEP and 50MHz F-layer propagation are by comparison.

With Es, TEP and 50MHz F-layer there is nothing you can watch for like a pressure chart as with tropo. you just have to take your chance. It opens unpredictably one minute and closes the next. There are websites promoting ideas like thunderstorms and "favourable jet streams" but these always look backwards after the event. They can predict nothing meaningful, only try to explain what you have already missed. At this point of scientific knowledge we are basically on our own with these propagation modes.

So here is what it has looked like here from one extreme to the other:-

a) Days when nothing much happened.

30 May radios on, me in the shack, no contacts at all

6 June radios on, me in the shack, also no contacts at all.

31 May one QSO - mind you it was a nice one to PY2XU on 6m.

7 June was not entirely without result. One contact all day - Jeff G8SEI on 2m. Thanks Jeff.

8 June had no 70MHz activity except D4L, a new DXCC.

11 June also just one contact - 4Z5LA on 6m. 

b) Days with sudden bursts of contest activity 

5 June had the 144MHz FT8 UKAC which produced 13 contacts into 5 DXCC in just 47 minutes.

12 June included the RSGB UKAC 432MHz FT8 contest - 15 stations in 61 minutes covering 4 DXCC.

c) Days with sudden bursts of activity on 50MHz

1 June - I worked seven in US and Canada on 6m in 21 minutes.

2 June - I worked 6 stations in Japan on 6m in 66 minutes plus a new country in the shape of 4L4LW.

15 June Two contacts all day and then a sudden opening produced 9 QSOs into USA in 38 minutes.

d) Days with sudden bursts of activity on 70MHz

29 May - 11 QSOs  which took 86 minutes to reach 5 DXCC and UN7MBH was good DX

3 June - 21 contacts in 10 DXCC in 80 frantic minutes.

Conclusions? No, more doubts.

There is a difference between quantity and quality. 8 June did not produce much activity, but it did provide D4L as a new one on 4m and J35X and J88IH for two new ones on 50MHz. Three new countries across two bands is worth waiting the whole day for. On the other hand, waiting all day when nothing happens is very frustrating. Is a burst of activity lasting an hour or so which produces no new DXCC better?

I don't know the answer to that, but I press on. When you see my charts with lots of contacts in various directions you might think that I am busy working DX all the time.

Nothing could be further from the truth. 

Three weeks work went into this one, even if the statistics ignore the start period and the end period when nothing was worked.

50MHz contacts over 2000km at GM4FVM 29 May to 17 June 2024

There may have been a lot of unproductive time but I reckon that it was worth it.

70MHz contacts at GM4FVM 29 May to 17 June 2024

70MHz has been pretty good really. I have noted several stations I did not hear last year, but who are familiar from earlier years. I think last year must have been pretty poor. So, a bit less silence than last year.

As for prospects for later this year --- who knows but my experience is that the two weeks after the solstice is better than the two weeks before. Let us see.

So far today I have worked ... nothing. Still it is only 14:43. You just never know and the 23cm UKAC this evening might be full of DX.

73 Jim

GM4FVM