Meteor Scatter on 6m.

For a long time, I've been trying to get some sense on how best to operate on 6m meteor scatter.

Of course, if you've just a wee bit of experience, MS is easy-peasy.

Plenty of pinging opportunity - if you can get some help to start off with!  Image: Wikicommons/Edmund Weiß

And there's the rub: I've not operated MS before, so which frequency?  Nobody seems to want to agree, with essentially all online resources being US-based.  In the EU, things are different, so I had to keep looking; 'PingJockey' is no good for me! 

I asked a few operators, who seemed to want to keep the MS activity to themselves by not recommending any frequency or mode.  The sole helpful and relatively up-to-date site I came across was this one by G0ISW - big thanks to him!  This site also pointed me to the EU-centric MS forum site maintained by ON4KST - again, big thanks are due there.

And which mode is best?  JT6M is ubiquitous in online resources.  This is not the latest MS mode, WSJT9 not even offering it as an option (it has reappeared in WSJT10 beta.)

The band plan for Region 1 is meant to have nudged MS operations from around 50.230 to 50.320, but operators seem to have other ideas, with only a very few having moved as IARU wishes.

Listening in at 50.230 just ahead of the Perseids, I could hear plenty of signals but no decodes.  This was my failing to appreciate just how stuck to JT6M everybody seems to be.  You have ISCAT A and B, JTMS, FSK441 but, no, all activity seems to be JT6M-based.  Then I got the decodes.

I'll see what the prospects of making some QSOs with a simple 2 ele quad and about 35W during the narrow peak of the Perseids might be later today.  For now, I'm glad I cut through all the dated and/or wrong internet advice, and once more, found out for myself, rather than through any help from experienced operators, how to cut it on 6m MS.

UPDATE:

A few hours after writing this, a lunchtime session produced my first MS contact with SP7QJF at a distance of 1147 miles (1847km) - not bad at all, and approaching the maximum expected distance for a MS QSO, given the simple antenna and low power of 35W out.  Later, I managed to bag three more QSOs.  It's a propagation mode that needs patience, but you can do it with simple equipment, at least on 6m.