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No skip....

B

bobdavcav

What am I doing wrong here? Usually, I think I catch the warning email too late and the opening has closed, but not this time. As soon as Outlook gave me the warning of a new email, I checked it and E-Skip opening. I flip on the radio and...... nothing. The only DX that showed up was the usual Vancouver and Victoria stations that appear this time of year. Am I doing something wrong?
"Possible Sporadic-E from CN87 on 6m. Try towards DL19 (165 degrees) Sporadic-E opening on 6m. Best estimated MUF 89 MHz above DM08."
 
The NW seems to have less E-Skip than other areas of the country. Propagation reports and real world reception are often two different things entirely.
 
If the reflecting E skip ion clouds are over the ocean, it is less likely they will reflect something. Any type of electromagnetic mirror has something in common. The angle of incidence is equal to the angle of reflection. While this is strictly true where the effective surface variation in the reflecting layer is less than 1/4 wavelength, it is roughly and generally true of any reflecting surface. At first approximation when the reflecting is rough, it will be like a circus mirror. And if the ion cloud moves to a location where there is nothing to reflect, you won't hear anything. If there were an experimental transmitter in the ocean location relevant to reflection, you might hear that. You might hear land based stations out somewhere in the ocean though.
 
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I'm not sure that applies here, 165 degrees if I'm not mistaken is southeast, so there should be stations there for me to pick up.
 
There hasn't been much skip at my location (Houston) this summer. It has been an unusual weather year so far, that might have something to do with it.
 
Pretty nice opening today here in Raleigh NC...jumped in the truck at lunch and heard stations in Minnesota, Wisconsin, South Dakota, Illinois, Michigan and Indiana. It was hot and I could only stand it for about half an hour, and I only checked a small portion of the band. There could have been more stuff going on elsewhere.
 
I've gotten a few emails about multi-hop openings today, but I generally ignore those because they don't give a muf to look below, and with the 6 M ham band apparently going all the way down to 50 MHz, it's not that useful to me to look for something that may or may not be there. I really don't understand though why if the muf was up to 89 MHz yesterday I didn't have anything even in the non-com band.
 
awsherrill said:
Pretty nice opening today here in Raleigh NC...jumped in the truck at lunch and heard stations in Minnesota, Wisconsin, South Dakota, Illinois, Michigan and Indiana. It was hot and I could only stand it for about half an hour, and I only checked a small portion of the band. There could have been more stuff going on elsewhere.
Click to expand...

Today in Boone I was getting interference from other stations on pretty much every FM frequency today. I even got a few French stations, so I'm assuming they were from Canada! I couldn't ID any of them because I had to go to work, but I did record a short video of it.
 
ai4i said:
...Europe, Africa, Asia?
Click to expand...

Usually Europe, Africa, and, Asia are too far for single hop E Skip, but theoretically over the ocean it could happen. Single hop is much more likely than double hop for many reasons at VHF frequencies. First, you have to have two reflecting ion clouds at the right location. Much more likely at 10 meters than 6 meters, for example.
 
I have been HF-less for about three decades, but I remember never hearing much of anything in the eleven meter broadcast band.
WWV on 25.0 was about it, but when the sun was up, they were like a local radio station.
I did, however, spend a few active years on ten-FM and I heard some Latin American STLs between 29.7 and 29.995.

i see a problem in that efficient antennæ are prohibitively large, but Wikipædia reports:
"Digital Radio Mondiale has proposed that this band be used for local digital shortwave broadcasts,
testing the concept in Mexico City in 2005."
 
Yesterday, I only had about 2 1/2 mins of skip in total. 95.5 KYOT Phoenix was IDed a little after 3PM with ID and traffic, along with an unid 96.3 country (must have been KSWG AZ, but no ID). Then completely faded. Later had a 90.7 with Spanish programming over KNWR, may have been Mexicali (they were playing Prince's "Let's Go Crazy" afterwards).

The east coast and midwest had a fantastic opening yesterday. MUF was over the 2-meter band at times. A DXer in Richmond, VA logged an FM from Watertown NY at less than 450 miles...this skip was incredibly intense. Over on a Global Tuners receiver in the NYC area, I logged 104.7 KVCY Fort Scott KS, 96.1 KLRQ MO, 96.5/98.1/102.1 Kansas City, 88.9 KJIA Spirit Lake IA and 96.5 KKSY Cedar Rapids, along with other IDs and a lot of unids.

Remember Bob, skip in the east will not usually affect the west. Sometimes there will be a fantastic opening that makes it all the way to the west coast, but most openings seem to die in the Rocky Mountains. The Es clouds we get here, on occasion, do not affect the East Coast (unless there's tons of double hop on the 6-meter band). FM double hop has happened in the past by many DXers, but it is extremely rare.
Don't use the DXMaps emails as reminders! In my opinion, look at the 6-meter map. Check the distances on the "List" page if there are a lot of RED lines in the west. Check FM if you see paths that are below around 900km (550 mi). The closer the distance on 50 mhz, the higher the MUF (Maximum Usable Frequency) for the cloud. Also check the TVFM Skip Log (dxworld.com/tvfmlog.html). If you see me (Yakima CN96) or others in the west, or on the other end of the cloud (like BR in AZ, KA5DWI/7 AZ, Craig/DM79 CO, etc) working FM DX towards the west coast, check the band. Es logs are marked in red as well.
 
That's better than I got yesterday, DXed off and on most of the day and had nothing. It looks like there's a lot of skip right now from NE to DE and KS to FL.
 
Never heard E skip here in the Seattle metro at my location. Never. Heard tropo before, but no E-skip on the FM band.

Plenty on 11 meter CB, some on the VHF Low Band back in the 1990's. None on FM.

I don't tune the FM all the time, though. But as much as I've listened, you'd think I'd get it even by accident. Nope.
 
Yeah, you'd think I would as well, and I've been DXing in one form or another for 10 years. I'm not sure though if the radios I've had have anything to do with that, that's why I got the G8, to eliminate that factor. It was October of 2006 when I discovered tropo for the first time, at the time getting 103.1 and 107.3 out of Victoria on the BrailleNote. Those are regulars on the G8, especially this time of year. I'm glad to know that someone who's been DXing for longer than I have has never heard it either. I've only ever heard it twice, once from the Eugene receiver on GT, and once from the NYC receiver also at GT. The case from Eugene was interesting in that I flipped on the local radio when the GT node was tuned to 98.5 to see if it matched, but Eugene was getting skip from SK while locally it was just the same old CIOC. Unfortunately I've never had full control of the radio in skip situations. There was one day in July of 2013 that I expected skip but got incredibly strong tropo instead.
 
That's exactly right, but I expected skip when I posted this because I got an email telling me that there was possible skip up to 89 mHZ. I turned on the radio and nothing.
 
No E Skip is normal, more or less, but if you look at the NAB Engineering Handbook (1960 is the one I usually use), you'll see graphs showing frequency, distance, and probability curves in percent. For instance, 1 percent probability would be 14.4 minutes per day.
 
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