2m Transatlantic?

This is my second year of being active on 144MHz.  I was unbelievably lucky that, within just a few weeks of getting a SSB rig for the band, I managed to cross to Cape Verde with only a 3-ele beam and ~50W on a 3m pole (accepting I'm already 100m up).  That's a QSO people have waited a lifetime to experience.  Had I made the QSO a week earlier, I would - very briefly as it turned out - have held the world record at 2m.  I repeated the exercise three times within a few days.

Hah hah!  3 elements to D4.  The mere idea that it happened upset a lot of people. 

To be honest, if I never made another 2m QSO again, I would walk away, happy with that D4 contact.  I started out to see if there was any chance, given my very good aspect and height in the direction of North America, that I could get a signal across there.

Of course, I realised this was always going to be a very long shot indeed.  But with radio, a lot is possible, if only one can be in the right place, at the right time.  That means, in practice, being in the right place at the wrong time very often indeed, so that the moment when that undoubtedly short duration when 2m might support propagation over the Atlantic is, ultimately, caught.

So, being on a hilltop in view of the sea, and with the comfort of a kitchen shack, my reasoning was that I could have the rig on most of the day and keep a listen out.  There's supposed to be a beacon on 144.285MHz on the Canadian side, which is a lot easier on my rig than endlessly sending out 'CQ'.  

I've listened and transmitted a lot on 2m last summer, the D4 QSO telling me it was indeed worth having a go, and upgrading to an 8-ele Yagi.  I got precisely nowhere, and never heard the Canadian beacon.  There's a beacon on the west coast of Ireland, too.  I hear that most days, but it goes from inaudible to meter-bending, according to tropo conditions.

Listening across the Atlantic last evening.

I hear and see a lot of chat about NA operators listening "often" for transatlantic signals.  But that seems to be a very considerable exaggeration.  Even when 6m is going strong, which might encourage more 2m listening, it's often the case that PSKreporter shows absolutely nobody active in more NE parts of Canada.  OK, PSKreporter isn't perfect, but it's certainly an indication that 2m transatlantic is a very niche pursuit that has very few, and perhaps no sufficiently active participants to stumble across that magic, brief moment.  

Past 24 hours' activity, all stations, on 2m.  It's nearly midsummer, but where are all those NA operators who are supposed to be listening "often" across the pond?

 

There have also been 'expeditions' to try and make the transatlantic crossing.  The latest I know of took place in late July, when peak Es season was past.  In practice, just turning up for a week and hoping for the best isn't remotely likely to cut it, anyway.

Tropo, it seems to me, is how a lot of people believe a 2m transatlantic crossing will be made. That may well be correct for qualifying European stations in tropical and equatorial regions, where conditions are often strong.  

But the 144.285MHz beacon, for example, perpetuates the idea that the crossing will be from the NE coast of North America to Ireland or the UK.  That's the direction it is beaming in.  Similarly, a lot of operators on the NA side are listening in that same direction.  And the very capable, EI2DKH beacon, aims due west.

Added to this, I think misguided, belief in the NA-EI/G path is the lack of understanding I see a lot of operators exhibit, relating to spherical geometry represented on flat maps.  The real, as opposed to imagined path goes very far to the north, where the required tropo almost never forms.  

Indeed, thinking about it this morning, the weakening of the difference in temperature between polar and tropical latitudes, due to climate change, is likely to make tropo even less likely, as I see it.  You can see the general effect on the latest F5LEN forecast, where colder air moving deep into southern latitudes is disrupting any potential development of tropo in more northerly latitudes. 

Colder, polar air sinks south over the Atlantic.  Image (C) F5LEN.

 

Everything, therefore, is in place for everybody to be looking in exactly the wrong direction for this propagation to actually occur.  Of course, there is also Es.  The chances of that providing the sought-after link, though still very low, seem to me to be much higher than the correct tropo conditions occurring in the north Atlantic. 

I agree entirely with the likes of John, EI7GL, who regularly review what is going on in the 2m world, and correctly assess that the Brendan Prize rules are almost certainly going to be satisfied not by Canadians contacting Irish, Welsh or English men, but by Americans contacting a much more southerly part of Europe (anywhere on land or non-tidal areas of the European continental shelf, as defined by the Times Atlas).

Ultimately, it's a question of what's important: a technical demonstration that 2m across the Atlantic is possible?  Or a human being claiming a prize?  The reason I put it that way is because, it seems to me, the best way to address this problem is not through humans laboriously sitting it out, wasting years of their lives for the right moment to arrive, if it ever does, to make a two-way, traditional QSO.  Instead, it would be so much better to put an automated system into place that can listen, second-by-second, day in, day out, year on year, until the stars, or some other mechanism, lines up just right.