HF Propagation

[K2CLH]

Hello from K2CLH! Conditions on HF have been pretty good lately, atleast for me in North Idaho with 100 watts and a 5BTV! My best bands lately have been 15 and 20 meters. I got Austrailia on 15 and Croatia with 20. I started this thread so that everyone in all different locations can share their luck or non-luck on HF.

73 good DX,
K2CLH
(nine years old)

[G4LNA]

Hi K2CLH,

It's nice to hear the bands are starting to improve, lets hope it continues. I've been doing pretty well on 40 Mtrs CW lately as well.

[K2CLH]

Yes, I was looking on QRZ last week and someone said they were seeing the best conditions they have seen since the 50's! Great news!

[G4LNA]

I think that was a bit of over exaggeration on that posters part, we haven't seen conditions like that since and it still has to go some way to catch up.

That was a time when the taxi services in NYC were interfering with our band I television in London here on 45MHz.

[K2CLH]

Ok yeah! I was also thinking that it was an exaggeration on the posters part. Although I have read how good the conditions were I am only nine years old so I didn't see them.

[AB3NK]

Well there was a solar ejection from the sun the other day - with a very good band opening the last couple of days - both before and during the solar flare - which caused Aurora Borrelius to be seen as far south as Georgia USA the other day.

The problem with all this is that when you gain something in one direction - UHF / VHF - you loose something in the other direction - HF / MF....

If you go on QRZ and look at my log - you will see that I worked the 10 meters this last week and made many contacts to people in Europe, and of the ones in the log, there was many more that I could not understand their call sign or got tired waiting for them to come back to me because they were busy talking to other people - contesting.

If I had known that it was going to drop off suddenly, I would have stayed longer and put more call signs in the log, and or contested myself a little.
The problem was that the people in Europe that were contesting were not hunting for people in the USA, they were picking one frequency, usually half a KC above or below a common frequency - such as 28.4155 and were sitting there clucking like chickens.

Or they went one step further and set up shop on a adjacent frequency and took more bandwidth then necessary - such as 28.458.8
They got so wide that you could hear them down on 28.455 - S-9 and up on 28.460 at S-9 and 28.465 at S-6...

Not what we want to do - to be good neighbors in the ham radio community.

Some of them - such as in Russia, just turned their radio on and where ever the dial stopped that was where they talked. 29.3888 for example...

Most all of my signal reports into the continent of Europe was a solid S-9 with 100 watts and a Solorcon 99a verticle antenna at 30' agl.
That is not too shabby.

If I had the Moonraker IV up and running, I could have probably made 1000 European contacts in the last couple of days.

Just as soon as it started, it quit.
Yesterday - I don't think I made one contact.

This morning, working the gray line - very first contact was Henry in Germany once again. 5 x S-2 my signal 100 watts, he was 5 X S-9 with about 500 watts.