Skipping in the Dark on 20 Meters

When I get up to head to work, most mornings I check out the 20 m band conditions. I get up well before grey line, but every so often... The F2 drops in out of nowhere, or it just stayed from the day before.

Today was one of those days! I saw that the maximum usable frequency was clocking in at 13.61 MHz, so I kicked off the keyer on Project TouCans as I staggered about the house waking up. A few minutes later, I was fairly certain I heard something over the rigs speaker. I keyed '?' but no one was there. The RBN, however, had lit up all the way to the East Coast!

A few minutes later, using the SKCC Sked Page I'd made a QSO with N1FG in Hew Hampshire again! The contact lasted just long enough for the two of us to exchange SKCC numbers, and then the band started to shut back down on both ends.

As a last little interesting piece of data (ephemera?) 10 minutes after our QSO, the RBN station at Stanford, W6YX which routinely measures 10 dB over what I assume is a ground wave path from my station registered 23 dB. 10 minutes after that, it was back down to 10.

The F2 layer is a fun thing :)

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