10m, West Coast/p

A fairly nice day today, although a little dull.  Not very active on 10m from this latitude, which is always a good time to see how much the coast helps get a signal to interesting places.

Southerly view from today's 10m portable site, IO73se.  Next land in the direction of the antenna is South America!

 

On WSPR, I received nobody at all, except for one fairly good signal that was already mid-sequence as I switched on the receiver.

Transmit was another story altogether.  EI4GEB was my main competitor today (no information on antenna yet).  In the only same time-slot comparison, I was 9dB stronger to EA8BFK.  Due to large Es variations with time, there is no point looking at other, non-identical time slot spots nor, for that matter, at other stations more than a handful of km away, such is the 'hit and miss' nature of Es propagation. 

 

I was epecially happy to get across to HP1COO (what a great callsign!), and at a reasonable strength when nobody at all from this side of the Atlantic was making it.  I had a clear, all-sea path to him, which makes all the difference:

 

 

Over on FT8, although I was hitting the Azores at +7dB with just 3W, and making it across the Atlantic quite convincingly, I wasn't getting any responses to CQs.  After PSKreporter had had some time to digest things, and on interrogating it after getting home, I was very pleased to have got across (-19db)  to Tierra Del Fuego, LU7XZ, at 13247km - remember, from just 3W with a wide bandwidth digimode!  Again, apart from a brief clipping of Brazil, this is another all-sea path.

3W to the world!

And to complete the record, polar mesospheric echoes, which are often good proxies for 28MHz conditions, were next-to-absent today: