Tuesday, 17 July 2018

An hour after (local) midnight.

I got up early, at around 01:00 UT this morning, in time to see if there were any noctilucent clouds about (there weren't).  Autumn is certainly around the corner, with the stars of the Pleiades now starting to rise higher into the eastern sky.

So I turned the HF radio on to 14MHz, to find the band very busy with FT8 signals.  I tried a CQ, and soon found the band was open to pretty much the entire globe. 

In the few minutes I operated, I managed to get QSOs with V31DL (Belize), plenty of US stations, including Puerto Rico, and even the mighty VK7XX.  That felt very much like autumn HF conditions, or perhaps, if we are lucky and the forecast is correct, a continuing increase in overall solar activity.

Always worth a 'CQ'!


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