The last Press Release by 1A0C‘s Team. Activity from S.M.O.M. will be July 1-4, 2012.
On the website http://www.1a0c.com/6meters/ there is also the band plan.
Rome is not exactly a remote place with a scarce ham population! So we don’t see the need for a beacon on the magic band. Even more, we don’t want to upset the local ham community with another active signal on the band. There’s a nice beacon there already (I0JX) and that will be more than suffice. We will, of course, keep keep an eye on early warning sites such as the 6 meter ON4KST propagation pages and the DX Cluster.As it was intended from the begining, this operation is primarily focused on working North America and Asia. Our plan for 6 meters is to steer the beam to JA in the morning. All of eastern EU will be covered in 1 hop as well. Then we’ll turn the beam to NA in the mid-afternoon, giving a chance for the eager beavers in West EU. Last operations from 1A0KM provided the Sovereign Military Order of Malta to most of the EU population on 6 meters. However, there are very few DXpeditions planned for this season; therefore pileups from old Europe can be large as people are just sitting around looking for any prey to pounce on.
Six meter propagation, specially on Es skip, is unpredictable. But our experience of the last 20 years points out that during the last week of June to the 1st of July are the best for transatlantic contacts and long haul openings to the northeast. We need to be very observant for any possible multi-hop event, while smartly managing EU pileups whilst looking for possible links across the big pond or Siberia. This is not easy, but we have done it successfully and most recently from Algeria, Egypt, Morroco, Palestine, Andorra, etc.
In the end, we are in Europe, hence, when working EU, the “so-called DX-windows” must not be overlooked, that’s 50.100-50.130. We are thinking to stay fixed on one frequency for all CW operation below it, between 50.084-95, in order not to disturb the band on the other side as to have the pileup bleeding into the DX windows and prefer to choose a phone frequency further up the band, away from the DX zone, e.g., 50.180. We really hope that local operators, and even the European 6 meter enthusiasts, will respect this decision of the team.
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