Some observations from Branson, Mo. The sky went from a bright blue to a bluish charcoal. We had about 95 percent coverage here. A shade 13 autodark welding helmet was great to view the eclipse, to a point. That point was when it got too dark for the sensors to darken the lens, then you got "flashy thingyed" when the helmet switched off. Whoops, that was not expected. The patterns that the dim sun made on the leaves of the trees hitting the driveway and sidewalk was really really interesting. It seemed like it formed a moire pattern. It was quite beautiful.
Now on to the radio observations. I did not see any propagation to speak of above the 20 meter band, which would be normal for where we are in the cyclic 11 year sunspot cycle, and we are nearly done with the Sporadic E season here in late August. The 20 meter band had "weird" propagation with high quick levels of fading and enhanced signals. For on any particular frequency, you were occupying other stations would come and go quickly.
But the really interesting observations were down on the 80 and 160 meter bands. These frequencies are normally pretty dead in mid day and the only propagation mode is usually ground wave. In other words less than 100 miles depending on antennas and height. This is due to the ionospheric D layer absorption on frequencies below about 6Mhz. But I was seeing and being heard by stations out to almost 1000 miles. This is typical of nighttime conditions. Which makes sense, because we almost had night time at least from a percentage of the suns energy hitting the ionosphere and causing ionization of the particles.
So all of this is fairly unscientific observations, but it was fun. I have never participated in any thing like this before, and I guess it will be my last one..