Thursday, December 10, 2015

Get back to 28 MHz

With the upcoming 10m ARRL contest I had to leave 60m and concentrate on 10m again. I hope propagation will be good for 10m. And as far as I can see via WSPR spots last days it will be good enough. Unfortenately personally I will only have a few moments to contest. Duty calls and I have to go to the job on Saturday. I will take the FT-817 and 1/4 wave 10m mobile antenna with me so I can contest at lunchbreak. Most of my efforts will be Sundaymorning as that afternoon we have to go for a family visit. Till Saturday I'll try some 10m WSPR with the usual 1W to see how propagation evolves. I'll use my vertical for that as it is omni directional and better on 10 as my 80m horizontal loop.

To calculate my chances I used VOACAP to do a prediction, although it's like the weather, you can't actually predict what will happen:

Australia/New Zealand/Asia: best time from 9-11 UTC with 80% chance at 10 UTC
Middle east/East Africa: best time from 8-9 UTC about 30% chance
Africa: best time 9-14 UTC about 60% chance
South America: best time 11-16 UTC about 40% chance
Central America: best time 14 UTC about 50% chance
North America: best time14-15 UTC about 10% chance

Steve G0KYA's propagation forecast gives about the same prediction. The advantage is that you can see it on the world map.

I was only spotted by PD0OHW from a village nearby this morning, no DX. That doesn't look promising! I spotted VK3KCX (2W), OZ7IT(5W) and ON7KO(5W) myself.


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