[Lowfer] Plenty of 600 m activity over night

[JD]

Quite a lot of fading noted around 600 m here last night, but there 
certainly was plenty of activity, as Garry says.

I went out to Rancho de Mucho Cenegal about 0130 to listen for the 160 m 
QRSS3 prior to trying for W9XIH at 0200.  No luck with the former.  No 
modulation strong enough to decipher on the latter, in AM or either 
sideband; although in CW mode, the carrier's wanderings around 472,515 +/-5 
Hz were pretty distinctive on Argo.

Next, I tuned up a ways.  At 477.30 kHz, I was surprised to hear "WD2XSH/10 
WD2XSH/10 500KC.COM" as I had never encountered that one before.  Excellent 
signal from Dex, of course.

Another one I hadn't encountered before showed up at 495.020, and it took 
several repetitions before I got the whole identifier.  The "XSH" part was 
coming in fine, but it appeared there was no slash before the number or 
numbers that followed, and QSB and QRN were both conspiring to keep me from 
copying that part.  After a while, the ionosphere finally cooperated enough 
for me to hear "XSH14" in its entirety.

Someone was operating in WSPR or a similar MFSK mode from 195.900 to .910, 
ending at 0242.  There was distinct QSB in the couple of minutes that I was 
watching, but at its maximum, the signal was strong enough to perhaps be 
Ralph's.  I was in a hurry to scan the rest of 600 m and get to 2200 m by 
0300, however, so I didn't hang around to see if the station returned in 
some other mode I could decode.

Bob's Opera signal on 501.4 +/- was loud enough for normal speed CW most of 
the time, but did undergo several very deep fades, which is unusual for his 
signal at this location.

The strongest signal during the hour was WD2XSH/6 at 508.800, which was 
really a bit too close to the lower sideband of NDB OF, IMO.  It was the 
steadiest signal, level wise, until a really deep fade (or something) hit at 
0256:50.  At that point, I took one more shot at 160 m, then waded out to 
the base of the mast in the middle of Lago de Fango Frio and reconfigured 
the antenna to put the LF-only buffer back in line for the sake of 2200 
meters.  Up until then, I had been running without it in order to have ample 
signal on 160 m.  If I'd had it in circuit for 600 m, fading signals would 
not have dropped so far into the murk, but the static would have been 
correspondingly higher, too.  There would have been little net benefit.

The transatlantic effort was largely futile, although over the course of two 
hours I did see part of two characters in DFCW that were probably from 
M0BMU, judging by the frequency.  Up at the high end, MP was so loud that it 
was blasting through S9+ static strongly enough to produce dogbones even 
with Argo one notch above minimum sensitivity in manual gain mode.  On a 
second Argo instance, running at higher gain, it appeared NA was trying to 
make it through, but no complete ID was caught.

There was almost no wind to infiltrate the 32 F air into the car, so I 
didn't get chilled quite as quickly as I expected last night, but by 0600 it 
was definitely time to return to the warm house in town.

John