Once in a Lifetime

You know the old song: 

Once in a lifetime
A man has a moment
One wonderful moment
When fate takes his hand

I thought this looked like it could be my weekend for a once in a lifetime moment, but reality said not me, not now. 

Relax, I'm not talking about normal, human stuff, like this love song. I'm talking ham radio here. I'm talking one of those goals that virtually all hams strive for at some point, Worked All States or WAS. In this case, on the VHF band where I tend to spend more hours than on any other band, 6m (50.0 to 54.0 MHz). 

In my first couple of years as a ham, I targeted getting my WAS using only CW.  It took me three years and I recall trying for a long time to get my last state, which was Idaho.  This time, my last state is Alaska. In my lifetime on 6m, I started playing on the band in 2002, I have met and read of many people who have WAS, but it's hard from Florida. Here in Central Florida, we're about as far from Alaska as we can be and still be in the continental United States. 

The key this time is we're in the peak of solar cycle 25 and we're getting solar flux numbers we haven't seen since cycle 23, 22 years ago.  This week, the F2 (longest range ionospheric) propagation has shown up as the Solar Flux Index spent days at 270. The rule of thumb for F2 propagation is that it's not just a daytime phenomenon, if you have a directional antenna, you should point it under where the sun is beating down. That is, in the morning point toward the East, as the sun goes through the meridian, propagation will start to favor north/south paths and in the afternoon, point toward the West.  

On Thursday morning, propagation reports showed dozens of contacts from Europe into the Eastern US, spreading farther west as the day went on. Eventually, around 1800 UTC to 1930 (2:00 to 3:30 PM EDT), Alaskan stations started being heard across the country, starting in northern tier of states and spreading south. I saw the reports but never heard one of the Alaskan stations. 

On Friday morning, I prepared for a repeat and essentially got one.  The big picture, if anything, was a little better than the day before, evidenced by the Alaskan stations being heard by some stations around Florida much later into the evening, even showing up in reported spots as late as 2330 UTC (7:30 PM EDT). In keeping with being a repeat I never heard one of the half dozen different Alaskans, only other stations calling them with very, very few of those others stations completing a contact. At one point, I noticed my station had copied a station in the Midwest working Alaska and looked up where they were about 800 miles NW of me in Missouri. 

Today, the solar flux had dropped into the 250s and the propagation suffered.  Yes, there were some Alaskan stations on the air, but they never made it even as close as that 800 miles NW of me. 

Here's a plot I’ve shown regularly which shows the SSN for the last five cycles back to 1975. I like this plot because it’s my ham radio biography in one plot. That is, every cycle I’ve been through is on this plot (and I was a shortwave listener for the cycle before the first one here). The plot is posted to Space Weather News, but is created by a separate site, Solen.info. The last time I posted this was back in May, which is about midway between 40 and 50 months on the X-axis. The smoothed sunspot number has taken a dramatic rise since then, and looks like it may exceed cycle 23 in the next few months.  I may get more chances at Alaska as the cycle peak unfolds.