... a personal summary.
This year's E season has been a complete mystery to many of us. Not only do the vast majority of European DXers consider this to be the worst European Es season EVER, but it has also behaved in an unpredictable manner, being good at both ends and mostly rubbish in the middle.
Sporadic E is unpredictable at the best of times. That's why it's called "Sporadic"! But when you look back over the season, you see just how upside-down it has been. April saw the first Es on band 2 frequencies. An early start indeed! As we went through May, sporadic E opening just became more and more fleeting and were confined to the bottom of band 2. A "blink and you'll miss it" scenario.
By June I think many of us had almost given up. There were a few decent openings, but nothing on the scale of those from the 2013 season. July seemed to show some improvements but they were short-lived.
Yes, there were a few good openings, but I would say that only two or three came close to those of last year. Some DXers in western Europe would say the biggest openings came around the 2nd and 3rd of July with possibly the best Scandinavian > UK & Ireland paths on record. Conditions on July 3rd gave me my biggest single day's log ever with almost 500 loggings. Check them here.
Conditions tapered off after this and reverted back to their hit and miss/teasing/bottom of the band character. Trying not to blink became hard on the eyes but we had plenty of practice. Yet it's hard to believe then that my personal sporadic E logbook this year has been the biggest I have had here on the east coast! How come? Had it not been for my idea of video recording these brief openings and scanning quickly up and down the band to capture the RDS I would never have achieved this. Quantity is not the same as quality, naturally, but I don't think that's a fair way of looking at any kind of loggings. This method enabled me to catch a lot of stations I would have otherwise missed, including many unusual and valued personal firsts.
In four years of DXing on an empty band here on the east coast, not once have I been aware of any double-hop Es reception. I find this very unusual. Not that I expect to have double hop on tap, I certainly don't. You are either lucky or unlucky with sporadic E. It's a relatively high-angle propagation mode and so your height above sea level is not too important. I have been fortunate enough to receive a few tropo extensions to Es out into the near Atlantic, with the Azores, Madeira, the Canaries and Western Sahara coming through, but nothing in the way of double hop to the Middle East, for instance. Not even a sniff of Turkey - one of my DX targets.
So, as I usually do at this time of year, this has been my assessment of the 2014 season. In some ways I am glad the Es haven't been occurring on a daily basis as they virtually did in in 2013. There has been a good deal of frustrating though, not just with the teasing conditions. I missed a couple of the better openings too, as I'm sure we all do, but that's the luck of the draw for you. I can conclude that, for me, the Es this year have been fleeting, teasing, mostly quite weak and bottom-of-the-band, but above all, they are sporadic and that's why we love them!
Good DX all!
John
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