The overnight Kp rose to a modest and brief ~3 value, which was enough to bring a very large number of European stations to be received throughout the night at 14MHz. At this time of year, under quiet field conditons, this band should be quite dead overnight.
Two DX stations were heard: the now quite typical 9Z4FV, and the mysterious K6MCS (5W output, hexbeam beaming 030 degrees into Europe), who has long been noted to have some kind of special path to Wales.
Even accounting for the ~6dBi gain (source: G3TXQ) of the hexbeam at 14MHz, which produced a -21dB SNR at last reception, others with the, much more common, omnidrectional antennas for WSPR ought to have come through; there is, after all, a gulf of 13 dB before we reach the detection limits.
It's best to highlight the unusual nature of K6MCS by presenting a plot of received distances against time. You can clearly identify K6MCS as the ~8000km spikes that occur regularly in the post-22:00UT period, against a firm background of Europe-only (other than 9Z4FV) receptions:
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| 14MHz WSPR reception distances, 2020 December 28-29 |
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| East Greenland magnetometry (H component). |
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