Polar Mesospheric Summer Echoes (PMSE)
I just came across this fascinating post on Roger G3XBM’s blog.
The openings from Europe to Japan – and perhaps Europe to West Coast USA on 50MHz sound candidates for this. Many years ago when I was part of the Square Bashers Expedition Group that activated squares around the UK mostly for 144MHz meteor scatter, we found that we could work well equipped Scandinavian stations such as SM2CKR pretty much any time we wanted. At the time we thought it was ionoscatter, but perhaps not.
I’ve got some reading to do now. Thanks Roger!
Add to this event. A long long time ago, when the Nautilus was transcending the North Pole. A group of hams from the USN Underwater Sound Lab, went up to “Ice Island T3” . They took with them extensive ham gear that included 6 and two KW’s plus beams.
Well . . they didn’t succeed on two meters, but they did make considerable contacts on 6 meters down into the states.
More on this can be read from the ARRL archives in W1IJD’s article “Hams on Ice”.