A weekend with nice 10 meter openings / 2019-06-23

This weekend I had time for the radio hobby and made some interesting new contacts. Friday evening was a bad start, with serious difficulties reaching other stations with FT8 on 20 or 40 meters. But Saturday daytime the 10 meter band was open and I even made contacts with two new countries on the 10 meter band: Lithuania and Montenegro. I guess it was an E-skip opening as I saw mostly "nearby" stations from Germany, England and other European countries. With ionospheric propagation those are usually "too close".

If you look at the map of 10 meter HF contacts by PD4KH there is a 'ring' with almost no contacts around my home location (I have made some really close contacts, but that would be via direct line of sight). Other contacts start in the south of France, the west of England and Poland. Nowadays ionospheric propagation on 10 meters doesn't happen very often so when I do make contacts it is via other forms of propagation that allow for shorter skip distances.

Later on Saturday the 10 meter band propagation stopped and 20 and 40 meters allowed nice amounts of contacts.

When I can make what contact on what frequency is still magical sometimes. I learn patterns that repeat themselves, but there are still enough surprises left.