Bonjour, New Caledonia!

Well, we keep saying, don't we, that it's best to stop complaining and start transmitting.

And so it was this morning, at around 08UT, still fairly dark outside here, when a speculative 'CQ' on 14MHz FT4 yielded a very strong response (-04dB) from Eric, FK8HM.  He gave me a -05dB from ~35W to a vertical delta.

Great start to the day!  Terminator correct at time of QSO, but the path was almost certainly long, not short as depicted.

 

If you haven't tried FT4 very much, it's certainly worth a try.  It's especially useful, with very short cycles, for portable work, where you can get through loads of stations and make use of brief propagation openings very efficiently.  

That said, FT8 later, at 09:10UT, gave me VK6APK on 24MHz with a 3-ele beam, which was quite lucky, as the propagation was very transient.

I might visit FK-land one day...