A couple of days ago, I managed to work the OJ0AW on Market Reef on 30m. Market Reef is a small piece of rock in the Baltic Sea between Sweden and Finland.
This is Market Reef’s 50th year as a DXCC entity and, so I’ve read, many DXpeditions will be made to this piece of rock in 2019. So, if you don’t already have it in your logs, now’s the time.
I worked OJ0AW on 30m after calling for only about five minutes. Good thing, too, given my short attention span. :)
More DX (gray line)
I’ve been noticing a lot of gray line propagation on 30m lately. Around 8:30 – 9:00 pm here, I’ve been hearing Central and South Americans. For example, I work HK1MW regularly, as well as a couple of KPs. Listen for it around twilight in your area.
Sky wave or ground wave?
Speaking of propagation, here’s a puzzler. On June 9, I worked VE3CWP on 40m. He was booming in, easily 20 dB over S9. Now, Ontario covers a lot of ground, and I thought that he might be near Buffalo, or even further west, or maybe north, past Michigan’s upper penninsula. Well, as it turns out, he was about 35 miles away, according to QRZ.Com.
That got me thinking about how his signal was getting to me. It seems too strong for ground wave, but a sky wave would have to be almost completely vertical to get from here to there. What do you all think?
Hi Dan
VE3CWP on 40m may have been via Sporadic-E. If there was a Sp-E above your location capable of supporting 50 MHz propagation or higher then the skip distance on 7 MHz would be pretty short.
Hmmmm. I hadn’t considered that possibility. I kind of like the idea. Any thoughts on how I might be able to confirm that hypothesis? I’ve had something similar happen to me before.
If you hear something similar again, try looking at https://www.dxmaps.com
Go to North America and then MUF map. If there are enough people putting up spots on the cluster for 28 MHz and above then you should see the areas where the MUF is high.
Also try PSKReporter and set to 28 MHz, Anyone and last 15 minutes. Check the tracks. Anything in your area less than 500 kms suggests short skip.
With a lot of this kind of stuff, you have to infer where the high MUF might be rather than measuring it directly.