Taking the F5LEN tropo forecast into account I anticipated the tropo would move further east this morning and then start to vanish. Today is Fat Thursday in the Cologne carnival which means we only have to work half-day. What a nice coincidence! 😉 As I’m not much into all the carnival stuff I used the chance to be back home early and switch on the remote station again. Early enough to still be able to do a few more tropo QSOs. 😉 As forecasted the tropo moved further East again but it also started to vanish already. There was much QSB this time, especially in all the QSOs into Lithuania. OH2 and ES seemed more stable but these guys soon started to disappear, too. Didn’t expect to work Jussi, OH5LK, at that time anymore, as the OH2VHF beacon had vanished about an hour earlier. Interestingly it returned about 20 minutes after the QSO with Jussi for a few minutes being very strong (see audio recording below) before going down into the noise again. All tropo was gone by 14z overhere so I was very astonished to find YL2GD CQing in the evening. Did a quick QSO and he was gone about 5 minutes later again and since then the band stayed “dead”. So some nice tropo finally ended with 70 QSOs in the log. I really enjoyed it! All QSOs were done with about 650-700 W into a 9 ele LFA Yagi. This afternoon I switched down to shortwave once after I saw K1N beeing spotted on RTTY. Heard and saw the mess and immediately switched back to 2 m. VHF, Yours is My Heart Alone. 😉
------------------------------------------------------------------ TIME CALLSIGN LOCATOR TX RX BAND MODE QRB ------------------------------------------------------------------ 11:32 ES1CW KO29HK 529 599 2 m. CW 944 11:33 ES3RF KO29IF 559 569 2 m. CW 932 11:38 YL2FZ KO37QI 549 579 2 m. CW 952 11:46 YL3IQ KO17OD 539 599 2 m. CW 720 11:49 R2FAD KOØ4FW 549 579 2 m. CW 452 11:51 LY2LE KO24OQ 559 579 2 m. CW 738 11:58 LY1CO KO15XG 539 539 2 m. CW 674 12:01 LY1CR KO15CL 569 579 2 m. CW 577 12:03 OK1FFW JN69JK 539 559 2 m. CW 428 12:07 OH2AUK KO19TX 579 599 2 m. CW 948 12:19 YL2AJ KO16OX 579 559 2 m. CW 710 12:23 OH2AXH KP2ØOK 52 52 2 m. SSB 1045 13:00 LY2CH KO15OV 559 579 2 m. CW 653 13:02 YL2QW KO17OD 529 559 2 m. CW 720 13:04 LY2HM KO15CX 519 559 2 m. CW 601 13:07 SKØEN JO99JX 57 59 2 m. SSB 805 13:10 SMØFZH JO99HI 57 59 2 m. SSB 737 13:14 SP1JQJ JO73GJ 59 59 2 m. SSB 32 13:27 OH5LK KP3ØON 55 55 2 m. SSB 1134 18:15 YL2GD KO37ML 529 559 2 m. CW 939 ------------------------------------------------------------------
Jussi, OH5LK, CQing on CW:
OH2VHF/B, very strong for a few minutes: