QSOs with the West Coast have been always the most thrilling, also on the higher bands, and on Topband they are my main target.

I am collecting U.S.Counties and just managed to get the first USA-CA award on 160 meters from outside North America. But there are still so many to work, specially in the central and western States, and this will keep me busy for the future!

This is generally an high latitude path, going through the aurora polar cap, severally affected by geomagnetic conditions and I keep a separate dedicated data base for these openings. This is a graph summarizing them, for groups of States and for each winter season.

No doubt that the propagation conditions have been improving with the current solar cycle minimum, but they were expected to be much and much better. Considering that I got my retirement in July 2004, with much more time dedicated to the band since then (specially at sunrise time), my judgment is that the previous sunspot minimum has been better as far as the West Coast path is concerned, despite the very low and stable geomagnetic numbers.

The following graphs show the number of QSO’s  with California and Washington state/Vancouver, the toughest paths from Europe, but both areas with many regularly active and well equipped stations. These graphs do not show the same growing as the previous one, because most of the openings are given by the same big guns already worked many times…..

It should also be explained why the best months for California are generally from January to March, while for Washington and VE7 they are from September to December!

In any case, why such a difference between the behaviour of  these paths, 30/40 degrees West of North,  and the similar one to Japan, 40 degrees East of North? See here for a comparison.  OK, we should relate to the Magnetic and not the Geographic Pole, but it has been a long period without ant geomagnetic disturbance!

Finally I built the following graphs where the  cumulative West Coast openings are indicated for each day, in order to find the correlation between them and the daily Solar Flux and A Index variations. Once again, despite the regular activity on both sides, it seems difficult to see such correlation!

The first 3 graphs show the last 3 seasons of the current solar minimum.

Not bad for December 2009, but unfortunately we see an hole between Dec.24 and 29 …so again very poor conditions in the Stew Perry contest hold on the 27th; see this page. After the first days of January  the West Coast openings almost disappeared …too bad!

The next are related to the best 3 seasons of the previous solar minimum, for comparison: