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Winter 2003 Issue |
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The Last Hurrah for
Cycle 23?
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After the great fall F2 season on 6 meters in 2001, there was a significant amount of anticipation by veteran 6-meter operators as to what type of F2 activity would occur in the fall of 2002. Would Cycle 23 still hang in there for more 6-meter F2 activity? Part of the anticipation for potential openings involved the monitoring of solar flux values in the months prior to the fall period. In the Northern Hemisphere there were several days in July when the solar flux values reached 200 or more. This high value was only of benefit to some stations located in the Southern Hemisphere (during their winter season). There was hope that these values would remain high in subsequent months, leading to the fall-winter season in the Northern Hemisphere. The equatorial zone did produce some 6-meter F2 activity during late September and into early October. Coinciding with that propagation, there was a good TEP (Trans-Equatorial Propagation) season along the normal paths of the southern U.S. into Argentina. Many of the stations in southern Florida were consistently working Argentina stations during the late afternoons of this time period. On October 6 there was an extremely strong sporadic-E opening that linked the northeastern states into Florida at the same time a strong TEP path developed between Florida and the lower part of South America. With both the TEP path and the sporadic-E paths lasting for more than two hours, this led to one of the best openings for stations in the northeast U.S. to work into South America. Table 1 shows the stations I initially was able to work from my location on Long Island (grid square FN30), along with the propagation mode(s) indicated, showing the strength of this particular opening. After 8 PM local time on October 6 (0000 UTC on October 7), via sporadic-E I continued to work more stations located in South Carolina, Alabama, and Louisiana, until 10 PM. With the sporadic-E path moving higher north, after that time my connection to the TEP path was lost. Many stations in Maine and New Hampshire still had the combined TEP plus sporadic-E path for another hour after that, and they still managed to work into Brazil. Overall, it appeared that the sporadic-E opening lasted five to six hours, which is a very long time for such an opening in October, a month when historically there is sparse sporadic-E activity. Both the duration and the southern direction of the sporadic-E opening from the northeastern states into Florida made this an incredible event!
(Editor’s note: The MUF of the sporadic-E
event that Ken describes above briefly extended into 2 meters. Gene
Zimmerman, W3ZZ, reported in his “The World Above 50 MHz” column in the
January 2003 issue of QST that a number of stations in the Maryland, New
York, southern New England, southern Ontario, and West Virginia areas made
contacts into the Carolinas, Georgia, and Florida. Gene indicated that the
opening lasted between 2328 UTC, October 6 and 0011 UTC, October 7.) Click here to return to this month's highlights
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