Hello fellow SOTA ops.
The last two nights of 12/13 January starting around 10:00 UTC 15m CW to Europe has been wide open for me. I was watching SOTAwatch3 as well but no activators came on 15m for me to chase. For 2 hours up until 12:00 UTC I worked 24 QSO on 13th and 13 QSO on 12th up until 11:30 UTC. I was running VK legal limit of 120w to my old 6 el log periodic but did QSO with some EU ops with dipoles as well as a couple KW stations. Signal levels were not so high but the band was very quiet so easy to copy even low signals. Maybe any Activators from over EU part of the world might consider a CQ on 15m as well. You never know I might be at the other end.
Regards.
Ian vk5cz
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Hi Ian,
What I am starting to see is the 20-metre long path from Central Europe to the Eastern VK states opening earlier with VK2 and VK4 SSB stations workable from around 0630 UTC. This is a home station to home station observation but these are solid strong signals so portable to home station (activator to chaser) should also be already possible around this kind of time. The long path on 20 metres used to only open up about 1.5 to 2 hours later than this and then not with as strong signals. So propagation appears to be changing. This weekend however with have a large CME arrived from the Sun and the K Index here is already at 5 (storm level) and will likely stay that high until late tomorrow (Sunday).
Predictions for SC25 are now improving over the previous “same or worse than SC24” predictions from some institutes. Here’s hoping for a good SC25 over the next few years.
73 Ed.
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Gday Ed HNY.
Yeh I watch 20m too but I only have a dipole for 20m, my log periodic got destroyed in 2016 and I was only able to salvage elements for it from 18 mhz up to 28 mhz during the rebuild. Hence being able to QRV on the high bands on either path.
Me too looking forward to stirring up some CW activity on the bands again I worked G3NKQ the other night and we last worked about 8 years ago. Any SOTA chase would be a bonus.
Cheers thanks for comments.
Regards
Ian vk5cz …
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Ian, I’ll give 15m CW a try during my next activations. 5…10 minutes CQ don’t hurt and it would definitely be nice to have a QSO 
73, cu, Roman
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