Also for Australia I built the same graphs as for New Zealand, to verify the correlation with the cosmic rays theory. See further comments on this page.
I extracted all the VK QSOs and HRDs into two separate excel sheets: the first one for VK2-3-4-5-7 stations at a medium distance of 16.000 km. – 94° bearing (185 records):
The following section is for the VK6 stations, at 13.500 km. distance – 107° bearing (370 records, mainly VK6HD and VK6VZ), but I guess their activity has been reduced in the last years….or the low solar conditions do not favour this path, a low latitude one …and it is better with high sunspot numbers ?!
Sadly now VK6HD is a Silent Key. We missed one of the best and most representative Topbanders in the world and these graphs are going to be meaningless without the great regular activity of Mike!
It seems that the ducting propagation mode has been favouring the lower VK6 path in the years of solar maximum. The higher latitude and longer paths to VK3 and ZL are better at the minimum of the solar cycle and the ducting conditions are less frequent there.
The next is the usual graph counting the days with an opening with VK6 stations. Here is the graph with the peaking time of the openings.
