6M F2 ? opening

The following is a short summary of what transpired on the Magic Band on Sunday 30 September 2012.

At around 10:30 UTC I noticed we had already signs of TV carriers making their appearance this was about 3 hours earlier than normal. The same observation was agreed upon by Costas SV2DH. Costas has been actively studying 6m for decades.

I was hoping that this would lead to a interesting opening later in the day during the TEP window. This indeed happened. The band opened up at 11:37 UTC (about 2+ hours early) and I worked Max DK1MAX first signal to make its appearance. BTW: He has "devine" antennas....

During the first few hours I made many contacts with stations in Germany, Switzerland and others fairly far up north, much further north than what we normally experience during TEP. This makes me think it might have been a F2 opening. The History image below sure shows no signs of any Es being present, so it was not likely to be TEP-linked with Es.

 During the first 2 hours and 10 minutes I managed to make 120 QSOs.



Click on images for more detail.

ZS6A 6m F2 opening 30 Sep 2012

This was followed by 1 hour and 20 minutes of TEP. A further 72 QSOs

ZS6A 6m TEP 30 Sep 2012

The following image shows the 6m paths that were spotted during 30 Sep 2012.
As the saying goes a picture is worth a thousand words.

It might be worth noting that during this time we as I tried to determine if we had propagation to FR4, V5, C5, 9J, TR, ZD7 and ZD8 and nothing at all was observed.

The final tally for the day was 196 DX QSOs. Was it due to F2 or TEP. Who knows? Was it fun? You bet !!

6m Spots for 30 Sep 2012