Widespread and long duration 6m opening

Widespread and long duration 6m opening

I now understand why the 6m band is sometimes referred to as the magic band. I have been monitoring 6m for almost 2 years now and I was lucky enough to exploit most of the openings in this time. The opening yesterday was quite different to all previous encountered openings.

I worked the first station at 1500Z and the worked the last station at 2000Z. This gave us a total of 5 hours of fun and excitement. Normally these openings (TEP?) only last for a few minutes to possibly as long as one hour, this was a very long opening by comparison.

Normally the TEP propagation works over a very small well defined area. Yesterday it was very different.  The one moment I was working Oman the next moment it was Portugal. I was very lucky and managed a few French and Dutch stations as well. I suppose that was due to an Es link. This can be seen on the ON4KST History image below.

During all this I saw Alain TR8CA was active, we arranged a quick sked and that resulted in a digital, SSB and CW QSO. I only noticed there was a TJ3AY from Cameroon active, but I missed out on working him. Many South Africans did work him.

The other interesting observation was to see how many locals were active and everyone was having fun, from Polokwane in the far north to Ben ZS5QM on the south coast.

Another strange phenomenon is that during all this we had exceptional back scatter during this time. With my beam pointing North West I worked ZS5QM, V51YJ, ZS6WN and ZS6AYE. Normally I would not hear a thing.

My 6m South African friends were working new DXCC entities all over the place. I noticed Azores, St Helena Island and Cameroon being worked I only managed 95 QSOs (mostly on CW) and I worked 3 new DXCCs: PA0RDY Netherland, TR8CA Gabon and A43XR Oman.

This makes it all worthwhile.

73, Pierre ZS6A

ZS6A 6m 22 September 2012

6m History 22 September 2012