Never heard such a strong signal on 20m from a Kerala station!

Today evening I was quite surprised to hear a very strong signal on 20m from VU2GNL, just 283.6 km from my location. That was on 14.215 MHz at 5.11 pm local time. Estimated planetary K index at that time was around 3. SFI was 119 as per the Solar-Terrestrial Data provided by N0NBH on QRZ.COM. Solar Flux Index is a measurement of the radio noise emitted by the Sun at a wavelength of 10.7 cm (2800 MHz).

Usually at this time of the day I hear stations from Central and North India very well, but Kerala stations will be on skip and inaudible. Should be some peculiar ionospheric condition to have such a short hop of signals on 20m. He was on barefoot 100 W with in an inverted V dipole antenna with apex at about 15m from the ground. That is really a fantastic performance indeed.

I was using my full wave loop antenna mounted almost like an inverted V folded dipole, continuous with a 10m homebrew ladder line.

There was a homebrew 4:1 balun at the other end of the ladder line, connected to 183 cm of HLF 200 coax.

The coax in turn was connected to a homebrew common mode choke and then to my FT-710 radio.

That it is Short Skip Propagation and occurs when MUF is quite high. Maximum Usable Frequency is the highest radio frequency that can be used for long-distance skywave communication by reflecting off the ionosphere. It is the highest frequency at which a radio signal transmitted at a non-vertical angle will be bent back to Earth for a given communication path and time. MUF varies with the time of day, distance, direction, and solar activity.