[ETS/PARC List] Best DX in quite awhile

[Pete Fierro]

       Greetings
    July 24 2012...Day to remember in DX land! I had fun! Did you?73..Pete
KD2ARB



VHF DX: BIG VHF OPENING ALONG THE EAST AND SOUTH CENTRAL USA

    They are calling it one of the best VHF band

openings <http://forums.qrz.com/#> since the late 1950’s. This as hams
along the Eastern seaboard and South-Central states report what appears to
be both a tropospheric duct and some double-hop E layer skip that permitted
QSO’s from Vermont south to Tennessee and Texas on bands as high as 220 MHz
on Tuesday, July 24th.

One interesting report came to us from Kevin Duplantis, W4KEV. He says that
at about 5:30 pm EST in Knoxville, Tennessee that he was tuning around the
FM broadcast band when he stopped on WRJK 106.7. That’s when he heard a
commercial that seemed out of place so he kept listening. It turned out
that instead of WRJK he was hearing a station identifying as 106.7 the
Wizard, Burlington, Vermont. After a number of fades happened and the
Vermont station came back so strong that it totally wiping out the local
Knoxville station that was only 15 miles away.

At that point W4KEV reports that he took to the 2 meter band where he made
what he describes as a ton of contacts into the northeast and southeast and
Canada. Some well over 1000 miles distant. He then switched to the 222 MHz
band where he noted a definite E-skip opening that lasted a solid half
hour. During this time he hears Canadian stations make contact with the
lower parts of Alabama and Mississippi.

W4KEV hays that they do not get many tropo openings in his area so this was
a thrill to say the least.


Meantime the dxworld.com Propagation Logger for 2 meters shows several
likely record breaking contacts in sheer numbers if nothing else. By way of
example, Mike Larsen, KC0CF in Stanhope, Iowa posted that he worked 32
stations from Florida to Virginia during the opening and his report was
just one of many.

In all, it appears as if July 24th, 2012, is one that will go down in the
VHF and UHF record books and operators world wide are hoping its only a
precursor of what may be still soon to come in DX in the world above 50
MHz. (ARNewsline™, 2 Meter Prop Logger)