Hello All,
I trust Google Translate will work between us…
I was very happy to hear Croatian stations during the IARU September contest.
My station is located in IO70jc Cornwall, at the far West of the UK, it is the perfect distance for ionoscatter and FAI contacts with 9A/S5 areas. My site has no QRM and mostly no QRN either, the antenna is 4 x 16 ele by I0JXX, power 1kW. The site is 150m asl looking across the sea for 200km towards the East.
On September 2nd there was a small geomagnetic storm K=3, and a nice FAI developed over JO42/JO43. The opening was good from 19:00 to 20:00 UTC.
First contact was 9A5Y with my antenna beaming to PA land…. At first I thought it must be Conrad PA5Y! …then I heard the correct call and turned the antenna to 9A but the signal disappeared…I realised it must be FAI, turned back to 070 degrees, called 9A5Y and immediately got a reply! Very nice QSO, completely “random” :-)
Suddenly the band was full of many DX signals but I could not get replies from anyone
I think some stations heard my callsign and immediately turned their antennas to direct path assuming the mode was ionoscatter, it was a perfectly reasonable thing to do!
Of course, on the Saturday evening, the contest was very busy so it was understandable that no one could hear my signals under many local callers.
So I made some skeds on KST and completed some QSO’s, signals were very strong here with SSB at 20dB S/N in 2100Hz bandwidth.
Very happy to get a KST sked with 9A0BB. They were very busy at that time working 2 or 3 QSO’s per minute but they made a little time for me. 9A0BB a big signal for one whole hour here!
Also completed QSO’s with S50C, IO2V.
S59P was heard but faded and sadly was not completed :-(
The FAI in September was very unusual and maybe no one would have even noticed it outside the contest.
4 QSO’s in the hour was not so many, and it would have been nice to work many more during the rare opening.
I will be QRV again for the Marconi CW contest and hope to work more 9A stations, please listen for me direct path ionoscatter, or indirect by FAI scatter point if there is some chance of FAI (High MUF on 6m or a geomagnetic storm K=3 or more)…
In 2022 144MHz Marconi CW there was a good ionoscatter opening to 9A/OM/YO from here, hope it will happen again in 2023.
I have a couple of video clips of the signals, you can hear they were very loud in the UK, next time I will try to record more. I think it is possible to work stations in 9A with maybe 2 yagis/500W if there is FAI or ionoscatter so please listen for me.
Vy 73 everyone
Tim G4LOH
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iReT4VU91bI&ab_channel=TimFernhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xTQLz0skxtw&ab_channel=TimFern
