Now that the fall contest season is over, I can enjoy DXing on the low bands throuigh the holiday season. The low SFI number may worry some, but for me, it means great conditions on 80 and 160m. I recently have broken 2,000 unique calls worked on both 80 and 160m, and would love to push that number up quite a bit higher this winter season.
The past few days have been excellent into Europe on 160m and North America on 80m. For some reason, I am not seeing reciprocally good conditions into NA on Top Band. Not sure what aspect is keeping this from happening. I am imagining some high MUF bubble in the mid Pacific that is causing absorption, not unlike a Bermuda High Pressure system, but this is just a guess on my part. Either way, the good conditions I am getting on 160 into Europe are just not happening in the other direction.
Here is a 11mb MP3 I made on December 8th, while running Europe on 160m. Signals are excellent. On this day, propagation was best into Southeast Europe.
This morning I worked about 40 more EU on 160, with conditions extending all the way into the UK, with GI3OQR the best DX worked (a new one for me!)