When I checked 6 meters for activity this afternoon I found some. Nothing rare or exotic, but contacts on the Magic band are always fun. And as usual, when the band opens, it’s often to a single region, like a pipeline. Today it was Florida. Worked six stations there in short order. I copied a number of other stations, but those were within a couple hundred miles so I didn’t call them.

When it seemed things had dried up on 6 meters I moved up to 10, 12, and 15 meters and worked HC3RJ, CX5ABM, FK8HM, TI2JJP, V31DL, NP2Q/QRP, among a handful of others. I literally stumbled on the 3G0YA DXpedition. I hadn’t been chasing this operation because I’ve worked Easter Island before though this was the first time to work them on 12 meters using FT8 so when I saw them calling I jumped into a very short queue and put them in the log.

Following up on one particular contact with a visit to QRZ, I saw this fellow was also active on meteor scatter. Though I know practically nothing about MS, and have never made such a contact, it is on my bucket list. Visiting his web page I was surprised to learn I might be able to sample this unusual mode of operation using my existing equipment and antenna. MSK144 is supported in WSJT-X and was as simple as selecting it. This action put my IC-7610 on 50.260. I didn’t know there was MS activity on 6 meters, I assumed it was all at VHF. I watched the screen for about 30 minutes without seeing any activity.

Apparently this is normal so I fired off a few CQ’s just to see what might happen, nothing did.

But a few hours later I was looking at PSK Reporter and saw this single hit. I don’t know if that signal was reflected off the ionized trail of a meteor, for all I know the MSK144 signal was received via regular propagation. Reading more about the mode I see that most activity occurs during the early morning hours from 2am to 9am, or thereabouts. So I’m definitely going to try this again and see what might come of it. And yes, I still need to get that three-element beam for 6 meters installed and figure now I have some additional motivation to do that.