Finally!!! Decent 75M propagation last night!

[ThaDood]

Coming home around 05:30UTC, that 1710kHz Hudson Valley TIS, (a.k.a. The Pest!), was just booming over the truck stereo. There was some lightning crashes in there, but not outrageous. So, when I got home, I kicked on the HF rig and found 3799kHz and 3795kHz very much alive with Spanish EA1 stations and several UK stations. The 'Big-Guns' were in there at S9!. However, the weaker, 100W on-a-wire dudes, were all heard from S1 to S3. And, this is RX'ed on a compromised Windom, where 1/2 of that blew-down during the 9/22 storms. COOL!!!! And, this was at 06:00UTC, while one Brit commented the the Sun was up for 10min, already. Let's hope for more. I did also check 60M, but just FT8 on CH3. 160M there was domestic stations at 1880kHz, all coming in from S9 to S10/9, and lower lightning crashes. Catch ya on the lower bands? Let's hope...

[pinto vortando]

80 has been better than 40 early evenings here for the past several weeks.

[RobRich]

AFAIK, only heard stateside stations so far, but 60M voice is active on 5330.5 right now. Not that I check often, but seems I rarely ever catch 60m SSB activity.

[RobRich]

80m SSB from Europe is active right now at 0550 UTC. Some very nice signals. IIRC, one op said he is running a 7-element wire beam towards NA. o.0 40m is active from Europe and Oceania, too.

Just using the 31' vertical with a inline preamp so far tonight. I have a YCCC-style preamp to mount at the antenna feedpoint, thus allowing me to ditch the existing 4:1 unun and get a better match at lower frequencies, if/when I get around to installing it.