Two days ago I was going for my third night of 30m DX in a row. I had made some contacts on the other WARC bands in the afternoon and left the VFO on 17m and the software running.
Around 2100 utc I came back into the shack and wanted to jump to 30m. Lonely in the 17m bandmap was a S5 spotted by a W4. Such a high frequency opening this late is rather uncommon with mediocre to poor propagation. Strangely enough I could hear some US stations call the S5. So I launched a CQ myself. For about three quarters of an hour I worked some nice DX there. Slow paced but DX: a bunch of East Coasters, W5 and W9, some zeroes, one weak W6 from CA and a few sevens from Nevada and Washington. One K7 tricked me into copying KL7 at first. But is was ‘only’ K7, the polar flutter I love so much on the CW tone made me think it was Alaska.
Other than this, goodies from PY, YV and even one HP1 called me. After that it was time to QRT and go to bed without 10 MHz this time. Just to say that the bands may be open at times you don’t expect.