Transatlantic 6m WSPRing

I often wonder, caught up in the excitement of the first 6m seasonal openings, why it is we all get so worked-up about DX that, on any lower band, would be easy using a shopping trolley and counterpoise for an antenna (of course, this has long ago been done!)

Now beaming the USA.  Yes, the sun does occasionally shine up here!

So, I decided this morning to turn my manually-rotated 6m 2 ele quad away from the usual targets in central Europe and, occasionally, northern Africa.  The beam is now pointing squarely at the east coast of the US, which, as you may recall from an earlier post, has extremely good ground gain.  Maybe now there will be some 'proper' 6m DX?

I ran the ARRL HF Terrain Assessment model this lunchtime, entering 50MHz into the equations.  I was astounded to find the output 2-ele quad antenna-plus-ground figure comes out at over +15dBi.  In other words, that 5 Watts I'm sending into the antenna is effectively bumped-up to around 96 Watts!  You can find a calculator for this here.  What's more, that peak gain occurs at just a couple of degrees above the horizon.

Once again, I'm always cautious and cannot say whether this figure is correct, only that I know from operating that the conditions towards the US from here are certainly very good.  Here's the output graph, with blue being the beam heading towards the US, and the red the much less impressive figure beaming due south, towards north Africa, Spain, France and Portugal.

So, in short, if I don't start seeing multi-hop Es WSPR spots across the Atlantic by tea time, I shall want to know why!  Returning to reality, I'll make this summer the transatlantic 6m experiment, and see what, if anything, happens over the long term.  I just hope a few more US WSPR stations come on line soon...