VK6YM was visible as an FT8 signal on the waterfall from about 08:00UT here in north Wales. At 08:35UT, I managed a 2-way exchange, using my 3-ele LFA Yagi. The initial call was at an input to the antenna of only 15W!
FT8 has now almost completely eliminated JT65 and JT9 signals from the bands. Despite this, it does have a considerably lesser ability to be copied under difficult conditions. It makes up for this in the speed of transmission, and perhaps taking advantage of brief propagation enhancements.
Remarkably, I logged another Australian station - VK5BC - at 11:21UT. By this time, the sun had set on VK5 about two hours earlier. Such conditions are sometimes seen from the UK after sunset to the daytime west coast US, for example. But it is very rare for the UK-VK short path, and almost absent under recent solar conditions.
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| My VK5 QSO spotted on the cluster map. Wow! |
Again, the MST radar at Aberystwyth, west Wales, showed reasonably strong returns from ~75km. It's likely that the returns are from meteoric debris distributed around the world as the Earth crosses several meteor streams at this time of year. With very long propagation and some very short-hop paths too, it seems likely this material was responsible for at least some of the strange radio conditions.
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| Potential meteoric debris radar returns. |
Given it's near solar minimum, these are interesting propagation times, indeed!
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