Sometimes It's Not Propagation It's Wakefulness: K-4514 POTA

 The gang—12 year old Diaze, 10 year old Mota, and 8 year old Tawnse; internet monikers all—and I spend a significant amount of time looking at propagation maps from our POTA outings. We do it to see how our little radio is doing, to learn about geography, and to discuss physics—all popular unschooling topics here. It's important to remember though that sometimes a correlation is just that, a relationship between variables, not a causation. One of our QSO maps from this weekend's POTA illustrates this perfectly.

Keeping in mind that red place markers indicate RBN spots and that blue markers indicate QSOs, at first blush you might be tempted to say that Project TouCans was getting out to the East Coast and environs, and rather flummoxed by the Rocky Mountains behind our campsite. Sure, those fancy RBN stations—some of them are very fancy—out West could see us, but that's just because, well, you know, they had better antennas. But, real stations? You might think that TouCans just couldn't make it over the mountains that well.

A first prodding of the maps data might even entirely agree with you:

But a closer inspection keeping the time of day in mind gives us more information:

It's very likely that—simply put—no one west of us was awake yet, including the F2 layer. Note the last few wide spread RBN spots as the sun comes up.