Sunday 2 May 2010

20 Meter DX – Band Wide Open At 04:15Z

ua0zay

It’s early morning (04:15Z) out here in the south of Ottawa. 20 meters is wide open and DX stations fill the digital portion of the band. Lots of Pacific stations and quite a few Asiatic Russian stations on the air this morning. Background noise is undetectable. I have the AGC in the FT-950 in the OFF position to better hear the weak stations on PSK. I’ve just worked UA0ZAY  Igor, on the Kamchatka Peninsula. I hear Hawaii calling CQ with mostly stateside stations responding. I’m on the Cushcraft R6000 this morning running about 30 watts.

Earlier I had worked UA0ZK, Vasily, also on Kamchatka. Signals were all 599 and perfect copy. If you’re a night hawk there’s DX to be had with very little effort.

ua0zk

Petropavlosk Kamchatsky harbour_sm

The Volcanoes of Kamchatka are a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Photo courtesy of Wikipedia.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Bob,

Yes conditions were good to Asiatic Russia last night. I worked Andrei, RZ0AF in Krasnoyarsk using 5W.

His signal was strong but the copy was sometimes garbled despite the strength. I suspect his signal was being affected when coming over the Arctic.

The distance from NO66 to FN25 was found to be 5,300 miles.

73
Alan

Bob VE3MPG said...

Several stations mentioned fast fluttering and echos on signals around the time I was on. There was some 6 meter contacts via aurora so something is going on with the sun.