During Sunday in CQMM we experienced a very strange but welcome 10 m opening to North America. The band was quite bad during the last few days. Southern lines like Europe to South America worked (although I’ve seen better condx into that direction, too) but no North America at all. Even on 20 m signals were so weak I struggled to work this week’s W1AW portable centennial stations. It got a little better on Sunday, could at least work a few of the bigger US stations on skewed path, i.e. beaming to South America. At the same time we had a nice longpath opening to Japan on 10 m. Around 16z all of a sudden there were very strong signals from North America so I could add a bunch to the CQMM log. It was like somebody switched propagation on. What made it really strange was that I had to constantly change antenna direction for max. signal strength. Some W7’s were strongest beaming West (Caribbean), the mid-west was best beaming direct path and some W6’s (normally 325° from here) were strongest beaming 360° straight over the Northpole. Signals peaked 599+20 and I could even work a number of US QRP stations, some of them with real S9 signals. What made it especially interesting is that we could hear the SK4MPI beacon on 2 m via Aurora at the same time! I do not remember which US station it was but at least one was audible via Aurora on 10 m, too. He had a clear tone when beaming 300° and got the raspy Aurora scatter sound when beaming North! So both openings must have been connected in some way. Seems the old saying stays true: There aint no meters like ten meters! 😉
The opening was good to work W1AW/5 in MS & W1AW/0 in ND on a few more slots, too. Thinking back how difficult it was on the lower bands on Saturday and how easy now on 10 & 12 m made this opening even more appreciable. Sorrily today condx are back to what they were during the last few days: very bad. 🙁