KD0FNR Rockmite Booms into North Carolina on 20 meters... In The Dark!!!

The ionosphere has been doing reallyfun things on the 20 meter amateur radio band the last two mornings. The Rockmite is 20 dB into North Carolina at 11:00 GMT! (In the dark.)

The F2 layer of the ionosphere is 428 km up, and isn't supposed to be useful at 14058.4 MHz with an maximum Usable Frequency (MUF) of 13.36 MHz, and yet!

I'm guessing the grey line near the receiving staions on the map can't hurt. I'm not hearing any stations sending the other direction, yet.

Update 3/20/2023: I finally heard a station from South Carolina this morning at about the same time, (ok, ok, it was more like 4:30... I slept in.) Sadly, this morning, my signal did not seem to be making the return trip as my spots were limited to Berkeley, locked soundly in the ground wave range from San Francisco. Interestingly, the ionogram for California showed conditions that might have supporoted the trip:

They just didn't.

For those curious, and new to ham radio, the app I use to determine how far the little radio reaches is called the reverse beacon network. It's a network of software defined radios (SDR) that listen on a variety of frequencies to the ham radio bands. The networked SDRs automatically decode Morse code (CW) and report the callsigns they hear to a central server.

Here's the MUF chart at the time.

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