Great 6m Es Conditions Continue!

6m July 08 Courtesy: ON4KST.org

50MHz continues to demonstrate its preference of early July to reveal its magical powers. Here in VE7 land, the band has been open continuously to some region for more than 48 hours. Yesterday's repeat west coast sporadic-E opening to EA7, EA8 and CT1 was capped with a multi-hour opening to Asia.

Six meter operators in the western part of the continent exchanged signals with Japan, Taiwan, China and South Korea beginning at around sunset on the west coast and continuing until 0230 the next morning! Many stations on both ends of the path filled their logs during the heyday event.

To add to the fun, BV2DQ (Ran) in Taiwan, was also active and gave several 6m ops a new country, working as far east as Colorado.



BA4SI (Li), in mainland China also handed out contacts to two old hands on six, K7CW (Paul) and KE7V (Johnny) who also happen to be brothers.

BA4SI 6m stacked Yagis
 

Paul also worked two stations in South Korea along with his 310 JA QSO's, beating out his brother's 300 contacts with Japan. KE7V reported working over 100 JA's on phone during the amazing conditions.  W7FI (Jim), in Seattle, also did well, with his comment from the ON4KST 50MHz chat page summing up the event

" W7FI Jim - That blows away my 113 JA last night, pile still calling when I qrt'd at 0800z. "

I was also present for the action, but worked only a few dozen of the strongest signals as I have been plagued with exceptionally high power line noise this summer, directly in line with Asia. Additionally, a new source of QRM has cropped-up in the form of an S9+ 49MHz wireless headset that has drifted up into the band. As the days get warmer, it has now drifted from below 50MHz up into the working part of the band and last night had settled itself smack on 50.090. Being a wide band FM signal, it effectively destroys any reception for about 50KHz of the band. As Murphy would have it, the crud is coming from the exact same direction as my beam heading to Asia. Yesterday I was able to roughly determine its location with a handheld Icom scanner and today I will use a quickly-built 6m dipole to zero-in on the offending source. Hopefully I can eliminate the problem soon.