Hi Gary,
I've worked 6M off and on since 1957 (the off and on part corresponds
mostly with times I wasn't on the air at all). The only time that the
sunspot cycle had much to do with 6M activity was during that monster
sunspot cycle around '57-'58, when from WV we worked ZS in the morning,
then W6, then KH6, then JA. Openings were almost every day and like
clockwork. And our rigs in those days were typically a 2E26 (25W) or
6146 (50W) AM. I was one of the few then who worked CW -- most of the
guys had Tech licenses.
99% of the activity on 6M results from sporadic-E skip, which is most
often present during the summer months. Your part of the country (the
NE) seems to have the greatest activity, with fairly frequent openings
to EU, the Caribbean, and the eastern 2/3 of the US. Each E-skip hop is
good for roughly 400 - 1,000 miles, and the areas we can work are
typically a few hundred miles in diameter, and depend on the size and
location of the ionized section of the E-layer. But on rare occasions,
multiple ionized sections of the E-layer happen that can support
multiple hops, which is how we make transcontinental and
intercontinental QSOs. These multi-hop openings happen perhaps a few
dozen times a year from the west coast to the east coast; they tend to
be fairly brief (a half hour to an hour), and they're almost always
"spotlight" propagation, where I'll work 3-4 guys in the same grid, then
the path either dies or moves.
CW is by far the best way to work these openings, first because of the
advantage of CW over SSB, and a lot better than modes like JT65 because
a good CW op can finish a QSO in 30 seconds, where JT65 takes 5-7
minutes. I've lost a lot of JT65 double-hop QSOs because the band
shifted before we could finish. K1JT has been working on adding
"faster"modes to his WSJT suite to address this issue.
E-skip conditions peak around the summer solstice -- we typically start
to see openings in May and they continue through August, but strength,
frequency, and duration decay either side of that peak. There are also a
few openings around the winter solstice (i.e.,Christmas). With strong
double-hop openings, 6M can sound like 40M or 20M.
My primary 6M antenna is a 3-el SteppIR with the added fixed element
that makes it a 4-el Yagi. With that setup, a K3, P3, and KPA500, I've
worked about 350 grids, 344 confirmed. Before the SteppIR, I loaded high
80/40 fan dipoles with a barefoot IC746 and in the course of two
seasons, made a few dozen double-hop Qs to the east coast and KH6. A
3-el Yagi will do a lot on 6M. In Chicago, I had a lot of fun with a
stacked pair of omni loops at about 40 ft.
There are other propagation modes that can be a lot of fun on 6M. I'd
estimate that 30-40 of those 350 grids were worked via meteor scatter or
tropo openings, and a dozen or so into South America and Oceania via
trans-equatorial propagation. In Canada and the northern parts of the
US, aurora propagation can be good too. I first worked AU from WV, then
from Chicago, and made QSOs as far S as TN. Here in Santa Cruz, about 70
miles S of San Francisco, I'm too far south to hear it. The only way to
work AU is CW.
73, Jim K9YC
On Mon,8/22/2016 9:32 AM, Gary Smith wrote:
So my question is for those who have operated 6M for years and know
how the band works during the lows of the sunspot cycle; is it like
17 & up where any DX openings are unobtanium, or does 6M behave
differently at sunspot lows and DX openings are common?
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