I am not a big contester at all but since the Stillwater
Amateur Radio Club was nice enough to elect me President this
year, I knew I needed to be there and we got two nice stations
setup at a local park.

	It turns out that Earth got a glancing blow from a
coronal mass ejection. This is when pieces of smashed atoms spew
out through a momentary hole in the Sun's corona or atmosphere
just like air hissing out of a punctured tire. The CME wasn't
bad enough to kill the bands but it did change propagation for
the worse. After our event had been going for a while, I went
home and tuned around. My receiver has the speech board in it so
I could tell what frequency I was on. WWV is usually audible in
Oklahoma on at least 10, 15 and 20 MHZ on a Summer afternoon. On
Saturday, I could only hear it on 10 MHZ with deep fades. It was
totally absent from all other frequencies. Twenty meters was
still active and I could hear our FD station in the park from my
house which is a few miles away.

	Sunday, six meters was wide open but our FD station had
closed down as the club had not meant to really go all out, but
to have a good time. 

	On six, I heard several CW stations and listened to a
lady in Wisconsin with a W9 call working one station after
another.

	I had to break off listening and do some furniture
moving but it sounds like it was a very good field day despite
the CME. The Sporadic E on Sunday made up for it. Who knows?
Maybe they were related but Sporadic E is so common in Summer
around the Solstice that it was most likely just coincidence.

Martin