Alright hams, the next big VHF contest is next weekend

I've got to say I've never had much luck in it, but the ARRL September VHF Contest is next weekend. It runs from Saturday Sept. 12 at 1800Z, to 0300Z, on Monday Sept. 14. Here on the East Coast, that's Saturday at 2:00 PM until Sunday night at 11:00 PM. If you've read my ramblings about the other ARRL VHF contests, they all that time format. The first time I ever tried to do anything in that contest was back in early '80s, when I didn't have 6m station at all, and was operating with my HF transceiver driving a 2m transverter I designed and built. I heard absolutely nothing other than the couple of local guys on 2m sideband (voice).

I never tried the June version of this contest until I got on 6m in the early 2000s - I'm not sure what year it was but my first contacts on 6 were in the spring of 2002, so there's a chance that was the first time I worked the June VHF contest. It would have been both CW and phone. After retirement, I started paying more attention to contests like this and made it a point to try the three contests the ARRL puts on: January, June, September. It has always been the case that June is the best and September is the worst.  

Nowadays, I have a radio that has 2m and 70cm (144 and 432 MHz bands) built in, but I don't have an antenna for either of those two bands. (I still have that 2m transverter on a closet shelf, so it may even still work) 

The bigger problem in my eyes is that the Sporadic E season is over. I think my last couple of E skip contacts around the US were almost a month ago; around the 10th of August. While there can be sporadic openings around the winter equinox, and more broadly from around November into January, the northern hemisphere summer E season tends to be better. Back in late January of '24, I worked both New Zealand, and Australia over the course of a couple of days. That propagation, at least the longest hop of "a few" it takes to get there, is more likely to be F layer. A common explanation is that the first and/or last hops of propagation tend to be E layer skip, and after one or two E layer skips, the signal becomes F layer skip. It can be E skip at one or both ends, and move around in the ionosphere.  

Unlike E layer skip, F skip is easier to predict from the Solar Flux Index, sometimes referred to as the 10.7cm solar flux (2.80 GHz). In general, the more the merrier for VHF, and while today's SFI has been around 100 and "quiet sun" levels are in the 70s, F and F2 layer skip are better when it's much higher than 100. A year ago, values around 200 and higher happened a few times.   

An illustration of the ionosphere layers, called the D, E and F layers – in order of height. If solar energy is high enough, the F layer can split into two layers called (imaginatively enough) F1 and F2.