I deployed my 40-6m OCF dipole in my back yard here in Stockton, CA (grid CM98hb), and tuned on 20m on Saturday afternoon, and for the first time on this band found a clear QSO in progress.
W3BQG was transmitting initially with 1000w from near Pittsburgh, PA, and his CQ was answered by someone in Japan, whom I could also hear. He says he later bumped it down to 500w.
A lot of the time on simplex conversations like this, it’s one-sided with only the nearer person audible, but this was an easy QSO to follow. I suspect the Japanese operator was sending high wattage as well. This was almost 3pm PDT, so that would have been close to 7am in Japan.
20m is amazing during the day. I wish I could get my antenna real high so I could start trying to contact the busy DX bands. I did try later, calling CQ from KF6UJS/AG, but no one could hear me. I’ll keep trying!