Winter Es breaks out again!

Some very good DX appeared from about 09:30UT this morning, and continued into the afternoon.

Although it's actually very common to reach into the Indian Ocean on 12m, even at this dead state of the solar cycle, I was amazed to see FR4OO reporting reception of my 25W from the 3 ele LFA at a whopping +16dB!  That's almost certainly the strongest report I've ever had from the Indian Ocean since FT8 began.

Spectacular report from FR4OO.

A few minutes later, the propagation drops to almost nothing, but then recovered.

Sadly, there were absolutely no stations active in VK, and ZS took a while to wake up to the ongoing situation.  Eventually, I managed a couple of QSOs with ZS.


The afternoon looks likely to produce transatlantic openings at 12m.

Up at 10m, I was hearing 3B8CW, but with only a delta loop and being much too far north, my chances of reaching him were not good.  But there were plenty of strong European stations to be worked.

The Es seems to have been sparked locally over Europe by a strong front running across the middle of the continent.  Very unusually for this time of year, thunderstorms were active along and around that front, and were even seen here in north Wales last evening.

Strong front with thunderstorms over central Europe.

All the 10m reports were to the south of a thunderstorm front covering most of central Europe.

These storm disturbances, which propagate all the way up to mesosphere height, may well have provided the link from northern Europe to more southerly Es patches, and then on to the Indian Ocean.

Or it could have been another instance of the proposed propagation mechanism of the north-south teleconnection that was discussed here, and developed further here.